


Baptized in Fire

by NonoLeMog



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Kidnapping, M/M, Psychological Torture, Slash, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 10:14:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2728565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NonoLeMog/pseuds/NonoLeMog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luckily, after what could only have been a few hours – it had felt like weeks, but the sun was still high in the sky – the sound of helicopter blades turning sounded from above. A black helicopter was headed straight for him. Relief swept his body. He took one feeble step, staggered, and fell to his knees.</p><p>Before the helicopter could land, a dark-haired man jumped out, onto the sand in front of him. With military-like posture, he stalked towards Tony.</p><p><em>Wait. Is his arm metal? Who </em>is <em>this guy?</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Out of the frying pan...

**Author's Note:**

> All my thanks to the awesome [equalopportunityobsessor](http://archiveofourown.org/users/equalopportunityobsessor/works) for betaing this work, and to [MelancholyMadness](https://www.fanfiction.net/u/2189028/) for helping me with the first chapter. They are the reason why this whole thing makes sense!
> 
> This fic is going to be pretty long and I don't have an updating schedule, so you might want to subscribe if you want to read it... It is a work in progress, I will add tags and warnings when they become relevant. To avoid spoilers, the warnings will be in the end notes, but you can expect Tony's and Bucky's trauma to be extensively talked about, so... Proceed with caution if you're sensible to that kind of things.
> 
> Last but not least, English is not my first language and I'm not an expert on the movies or comics, so if you catch any mistake, please tell me about it!

The hot Afghan air filled his mouth with blood and dust. He felt like he was choking. Yinsen was _dead_. Tony should have realized what the doctor had meant when he said he would be “seeing his family”. _So much for being a genius._

 _Idiot._ He felt so useless. What kind of man was he if he couldn't even save the one man that needed him? His only consolation was the thought of revenge... and then, escape.

_Don't waste your life._

With one last look for Yinsen, Tony rose from the stone floor of the cave. He had a life to live, mistakes to fix. Scaring away the terrorists was easy; his priority was to destroy every last Stark weapon from the camp. He was soon pretty sure that he had succeeded (the whole place had been blown up), and as the shooting resumed around him, he took off into the sky.

But the moments of freedom were just that: moments. Before he knew it, he'd crashed into the sand in his half-reduced-to-pieces armor.

“Not bad,” he said to himself, impressed, before picking himself up to begin his trek under the desert sun.

He didn't make it far. He was hurt, dehydrated, and hadn't eaten properly in a few months. His muscles ached more and more with every step and another layer of sand crusted to his face with every bead of sweat. Luckily, after what could only have been a few hours – it had felt like weeks, but the sun was still high in the sky – the sound of helicopter blades turning sounded from above. A black helicopter was headed straight for him. Relief swept his body. He took one feeble step, staggered, and fell to his knees.

Before the helicopter could land, a dark-haired man jumped out, onto the sand in front of him. With military-like posture, he stalked towards Tony.

 _Wait. Is his arm metal? Who_ is _this guy?_

Contrary to what was widely believed, Tony still had a shred of survival instinct left in his body, and at the moment, it screamed to him to get the hell away from that man. He'd never seen him before, couldn't justify why the hair on his arms were standing on end, but there was almost something... animalistic about him. He didn't walk. He prowled, as if he was a tiger and Tony the defenseless prey. Which was, sadly, probably the truth, if the people in this helicopter were not the help he had been waiting for.

He desperately tried to scramble back, possibly stand up, but to no avail. A metallic hand closed on the front of his shirt, yanking him off his feet and forward. Up close, the guy was more than terrifying. Not only because of the obvious reasons, like his extremely evident muscular build that made him look as if he could snap Tony in two, or the guns sticking visibly out of his belt (okay, maybe that was part of it…). No, the reason that he’d rather take on an angry bear than stay with the man in front of him for another five seconds was that his eyes were _dead_. Dark hollow caverns that held no sympathy, no concentration, just a cold detached disinterest that chilled him straight to the arc reactor. Tony gulped and tried to struggle, but his attempts were futile. The muzzle of a gun pressed into his left temple and Tony sighed in defeat.

His hands held high in surrender, he allowed himself to be dragged back to the helicopter, and, his vision already swimming, felt a prick in his neck, before the darkness swallowed him whole.

 

* * *

 

When Tony came to, he was lying down on what he guessed, from the sound of the engine, was the floor of a van, probably a Russian one. His hands were tightly handcuffed behind his back. He groaned and tried to raise his head, but the strain was too much, so he set it back down, exhausted. He had no idea what those bastards had given to him, but he still felt like all his thoughts had to dig their way through dense fog. Even his tongue seemed leaden.

He felt the vicious kick to his ribcage before he registered it. The grunt he made seemed out of time. Tony wondered if he had, in fact, grunted on time and just hadn’t realized it, or if he was just grunting because it was the thing to do when you got kicked in the ribs. _Probably the first_. _And why would that even matter?_

“He's waking up,” a man called from somewhere above him, maybe the one who had kicked him? “Isn't it a little early? We won't be there for another half an hour...”

Another voice answered.  “ He will wait. ” While the first one had  seemed annoyed  ( and  perhaps slightly worried ) , that one was  deep, cold and emotionless.  _Wonder who that is,_ Tony thought sarcastically. _Great._

When they stopped – probably thirty minutes later – the drugs still weren't out of his system and dehydration left his head drooping. He was too weak to fight when the strong human hand of the metal-armed man caught him by the arm and hoisted him upward. His feet scraped along the ground as he was dragged out of the vehicle. He tried to regain his footing, but had little success.

The air wasn't as dry as it had been before: they had probably left the desert. After a few moments, the blinding light and stifling heat were brutally replaced by darkness and cold, that soon, as he grew accustomed to them, became artificial light and nicely cool air. A building, then. A short walk later, he was shoved forward, but the hand gripping him from behind stopped him from falling on his face.

“Welcome, Mr. Stark,” a cold German-accented voice greeted.

The man holding him suddenly pushed him forward, but before he had enough time to straighten up, the German man gripped his throat and lifted him up until he was just barely on his toes. He tried to speak, but only gurgling sounds came out, half from the pressure on his throat and half from his swollen tongue. He blinked hazily.

The man in front of him was tall, taller than he was, and his face was completely bland apart from the smile that stretched his lips without reaching his eyes. The man scrutinized him for one more second, squeezed the soft spot below his jaw, and let him drop to his knees.

“He appears to be in perfect condition,” the man said.

 _Yeah right,_ Tony thought.

“Perfect. Put him to work as soon as possible. He will be a valuable acquisition to HYDRA.”

 _Oh hell no_ , Tony thought. HYDRA sounded suspiciously like the Nazi organization that Captain America fought against during the Second World War (that is, if the stories his father had told him were true). Tony may have been naive enough to be business partners with terrorists, but he was not stupid enough to help _Nazis._

“Yes, sir!” the voice of the man that had kicked him in the van answered from behind him.

In one last ditch effort to escape, he tried to jerk out of his captor’s grip, but he was easily ripped back towards the man and received a punch to the gut for his efforts. He swore silently, tears prickling his eyes from the pain.Without a word, he was manhandled through another door, lucky enough, this time, to right himself on both feet, but still unable to stop moving. They only walked for a few minutes before he was unbound and thrown on a concrete floor. He barely managed to roll to avoid hitting his head on the ground as the door closed behind him, locking him inside.

“Well, fuck,” he breathed.

 

* * *

 

He was tired, and hungry, and so fucking _cold_. The small, unappetizing “meal” he had eaten a few hours ago hadn't helped: he knew that he was kept in this state on purpose. Now that he wasn't drugged anymore, he could move freely, but he felt terribly weak. He didn't know for how long he had been there, but if he was receiving two meals a day as he thought, it had been around two weeks. And they had not asked him for a single thing.

He knew what it was, of course. It was a form of torture, one far more refined and effective than anything the Ten Rings could come up with. He wanted to say that he would not break, but it was _hard_. The time in this small, cold room, completely bare, had left him weaker than he had ever been. After the cave, it was too much. He was ready to give up his pride just for a warm shower, some real food and a night in a bed. And he had precisely zero idea about how he could escape.

Suddenly, jerking him out of his doze, what sounded suspiciously like a distant explosion rattled the room. He jumped to his feet – well, he tried, it was actually more like scrambling – and cautiously approached the door. It was still locked and made of steel, and he had checked it a dozen times in the beginning, so he didn't need to try again to know that he couldn't open it, but he really hoped that whoever was coming wouldn't leave him there.

Indeed, after a wait during which he heard muffled shouting and running on the other side of the door, it opened to reveal a few people dressed in black and carrying guns.

“Who...?” he managed to get out from his parched and sore throat. He hadn't drunk enough in the last few weeks, and hadn't had anyone to speak to: he was a little rusty...

“Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistic Division, sir,” a young man who didn't even look to be twenty-five answered. “Who are you?”

He wondered how it was possible for him not to be recognized, before remembering that he had disappeared for probably more than three months, was likely supposed dead, had lost weight, hadn't shaved for two weeks and was very, very dirty. The boy had no reason to expect Tony Stark, billionaire playboy, to be this filthy bearded stranger in a HYDRA base.

Before he could open his mouth to answer, however, a gun went off and the man suddenly fell to the ground. Pushed behind the fighting men, Tony could only watch as each one was hit by a single bullet between the eyes.

The sniper appeared at the corner of the hallway. It was the man with the metal arm.

Without thinking, he bolted toward the opposite direction, hoping that there was an exit that way. No, who was he kidding?He wasn't even thinking that far... Hoping to get as far as possible from the room he had been trapped in and the man he had been trapped by. Intellectually, he knew that it was useless, that in the state he was in, he wasn't going to go very far, but it was instinct. _Don't stay here._

He ran a few meters before the man caught up with him and slammed him into the wall by his throat. Black spot started dancing at the corners of his eyes and he went limp, recognizing a lost battle: he wasn't getting out today. The adrenaline was receding, leaving only weakness and exhaustion in its wake.

However, the man didn't seem interested in the cell anymore. Holding him by the upper arm, he started dragging Tony through the hallway. It was mostly deserted, and anyone still alive ended up shot in the forehead – HYDRA, or whatever organization the men from before had been, the man didn't make any distinction. They soon reached a door that led them outside, where a helicopter sat, apparently waiting for them.

 _Not again,_ he thought tiredly when he felt a needle sting his arm. While he was slowly blacking out on the floor of the aircraft, his eyes fell on a small cluster of agents that were watching them from the ground, led by a scowling woman looking at him with a gun in her hands and a glare on her face. She was shooting at the vehicle, but he didn't stay conscious long enough to know whether it had any effect.

 

* * *

 

This time, he woke up shackled to a chair. Well, that brought back some very unfortunate memories... At least this time, he had no bag on his head, and he could feel the reassuring hum of the arc-reactor in his chest.

A bald, old-looking man was sitting in front of him in an armchair, fingertips touching in front of his lips. Seriously, could this become any more cliche? The only thing missing was a big white cat.

...Well, apparently the snark was still the first part of him to wake up...

Tony still felt groggy, but not half as bad as the time after his escape from the cave. He felt coherent enough to be sure of one thing: he had to pretend to cooperate, couldn't afford to refuse because he couldn't take another fucking day of torture: it would _break_ him. Whatever that man was going to ask, he would have to play along. Even if it was about building weapons. Hell, if it meant that they were willing to let him access explosive, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing...

“Are you ready to work for us, Mr. Stark?” the man asked on, his voice saccharine.

The genius hung his head, trying to look even more defeated than he felt.

“Very well. You are going to repair a... device, think of it as a test... If you really cooperate, I will see about giving you a more important task. The Winter Soldier will be your guard; I wouldn't recommend doing anything stupid, as he has been known to be somewhat extreme in his reaction to stupidity. But for now... Asset, take him to the shower, he stinks.”

The same metal-armed man from before – the Winter Soldier, probably – unshackled him and grabbed him by his upper arm. A lot more alert than the previous times he had been in this position, Tony managed to walk fast enough to keep what was left of his dignity, and followed to what looked like some changing room shower. Ugh. Nazis and showers, bad association. He stopped in his tracks.

“Undress here and clean up.”

His voice was still completely emotionless, almost like a robot – except that Tony knew JARVIS, and JARVIS voice was nothing like that – but, he also noticed, hoarse from disuse. Apparently, he didn't talk much. Well, Tony was nothing if not ready to fill the silence...

“Is that a joke?”, he started, pleasantly surprised by how steady his voice sounded after the first two syllables, despite the hoarseness created by dehydration and silence. “I'm supposed to just get naked here in front of your tender eyes and at least a dozen security cameras?” He swept an arm around to the various surveillance devices in the room.

The Soldier didn't answer, although his eyebrows had lifted a little. He didn't really need to call his bluff, since it was pretty obvious that the genius didn't have a choice. And despite what he had just said, Tony didn't care about being naked in front of anyone (and hadn't since the eighties), least of all him: he was well aware that his vulnerability had very little to do with his state of undress, and the man looked as interested as a rock. An extremely unimpressed rock. But Tony needed to talk to someone or something that wasn't himself, because he felt broken and aching after the days he had spent in isolation, and snark gave him at least the illusion that he wasn't completely helpless and reminded him that he was still human.

Sighing, he started undressing, letting his unhappiness known by a constant litany of complains. Playing the spoiled brat was easy, it had helped him mask his discomfort for years and he could probably do it in his sleep. He _could_ do this, keep playing nice like he had done with the Ten Rings and get out at the first occasion.

To his surprise, the water wasn't exactly cold – which was fortunate, given his recent encounter with forced drowning – but it wasn't warm either, and he didn't stay longer than it was strictly necessary. Standing there wet, naked and shivering, he realized that his old clothes had disappeared.

“Hum, not to sound pushy, but am I really supposed to stay like that?” he asked, a little put out.

“Clothes later. Come,” was the only answer he got before the man started walking.

Fortunately, Tony noticed the towel that had probably been left for him on the floor and grabbed it, tying it around his hips before following. He was led to a small room with a narrow bed that looked like it came from a Romanian orphanage and two chairs, one of which had simple gray clothes – a shirt, boxers and flimsy trousers – on the back. The soldier sat on the other one, still as emotionless as before.

The engineer only put the boxers on before slipping under the cover and falling asleep.

 

* * *

  
He woke up feeling more rested than he had since his escape from the Ten Rings, or probably even longer, even if he was still far from his best.

Which was nice, but not enough to make up for the fact that he was being shaken awake by a goddamn psychopathic-looking HYDRA henchman.

And the metal fingers were not exactly pleasant where they dug in his shoulder.

He opened his eyes and sat up, hoping for the manhandling to stop. It did, and soon a tray was shoved under his nose. He accepted it and started eating the frugal breakfast that was on it. The food didn't taste very good, but he was hungry and so didn't complain.

“So, what am I supposed to do, today?” he asked his guard as cheerily as he could fake it. “Got troubles with your Starkphone?”

Predictably enough, the man stayed silent. He was still looking at him unwaveringly, and Tony found himself staring to be sure that he blinked. He did, but the blank face was still unnerving.

He didn't try to get a rise from him again, and as soon as he had finished his meal and put on the clothes they had given him, the soldier grabbed him by his arm and marched him through the door, a hallway that was closed by checkpoint on regular intervals – which shouldn't disappoint him since it was highly unlikely that his guard would let him go anywhere he wasn't ordered to – and to a room where the old man from the previous day was waiting for them.

“Good morning, Mr. Stark, I hope you slept well?” he greeted him with a voice that reminded him of some of the most vicious businessmen he had come across in his life, saccharine and threatening at the same time.

“Yeah, well, the awakening could have been better,” he answered with a bright, fake smile. “Not sure I can give you more than two stars.”

He looked around him, keeping his smile on. The room was small and almost bare, but its main feature was obviously the big black chair standing in the middle. It looked a lot like a dentist chair, but with restrains on the arms and a strange circular device above the head. Was it supposed to go around it? Tony had a very, very bad feeling about this...

But the part of him that wasn't busy being terrified by the whole situation or disgusted by what looked an awful lot like a torture device, the one that had eyes for machines and weapons, efficiency and numbers, noticed that there were wires sticking out of the thing, that it probably didn't work, and that he was probably supposed to fix it.

As he reached this conclusion, his host answered.

“Rest assured that we do everything we can to accommodate you. Now, I assume you know why you are here. We want you to repair this. You will start working today; you will be provided with the original blueprints and all the tools you will need. I trust that it will only take you a few days.”

The alternative was not enunciated but clearly implied, and Tony didn't say anything, starkly aware that he did not have the upper hand and that opening his mouth would only bring troubles. After a pause, the man smiled thinly.

“Very well, I shall let you get started, then. Asset, guard him.”

He left without another word, the door clicking shut behind him, and Tony swallowed. The soldier did not move from the corner he had posted himself in, impassive.

He turned to the chair: no sense waiting for tools to try and get an outline of the problem. Apparently, it had been shot at...

That was when his brain caught up with his eyes. There was something wrong with the restrains. Why were there padded on one side and not on the other? And there was something that looked a lot like an electromagnet built in the steel one.

Dread building in his stomach, he turned back to the metal-armed man who was guarding him.

Well, then, he probably had his answer, didn't he?

 


	2. Mixed signals

 “Hi, Robocop,” Tony grunted, waking up in much the same way as he had the day before.

He was provided a meager breakfast, was directed to put the gray clothes on, and was marched back to the room with the chair. Apparently, this was going to be his life now. He wondered how often he would be allowed to shower: the day before, it hadn't been on the menu.

He had studied the blueprints of the chair for hours already, and while the idea filled him with distaste, he knew that he now had to start working on it or his babysitters would get suspicious. After all, it _was_ a pretty simple mechanism: the structure was fine, and the part that was damaged was only a rotating piece supporting a batch of electrodes, that incidentally had exactly the right shape to clamp around someone's skull.

Tony decided to start with the mobile part. He had no intention of actually repairing the thing, but maybe, if he had a day or two, he could think of something?

He took a screwdriver and climbed on the chair. After five seconds of staring, he knew what was wrong and that less than an hour would be required to fix the part. Another ten seconds later, he had also found nine ways to slow his progress, which should give him a two-days respite. It was supposed to be very precise, after all.

“Hey, Yins-” he started before stilling, berating himself. That was stupid, he knew where he was, and he definitely didn't need to appear weaker. But the silence was gnawing at his already wavering sanity...

“Hey, Terminator, pass me the blueprints, please?”

The man didn't react to the nickname, but after a few seconds during which Tony thought that he was going to be ignored, he obeyed.

Well, he could work with that. The guy definitely lacked conversation skills, but apart from that – and the fact that he couldn't run complex calculations, but at the moment that wasn't really a concern – he would be an acceptable assistant. Maybe he could even be convinced to do some heavy lifting.

It wouldn't be like Yinsen, of course. He was more likely to break his neck if he caught Tony trying to escape, for one. But he didn't really look tech-savvy or interested by Tony's progress enough to discover his stalling, so as long as Tony at least looked like he was working, the man definitely wouldn't give him more to worry about than the cameras he could see in the corners.

A few minutes later, he stopped working, frowning. The thing was heavy, and he couldn't hold it and work on its underside at the same time. He glanced at the soldier's impressive musculature from the corner of his eyes.

“I could use a hand here, Darth Vader,” he said, the metal awkwardly held up by his shoulder, digging painfully in his skin.

The man didn't take the cue and kept watching him coldly. Tony frowned.

“Come on, I can't do this all day, jerk!” he growled, because _damn_ his shoulder was sore, and it shouldn't even be a problem except that he was not nearly as fit as he had been a few weeks ago, what with the whole being starved thing, and that asshole was just looking at him as if he didn't understand.

The soldier's brow pinched slightly, and for a moment his eyes darted to the side, his focused expression turning almost _lost_. He stepped closer and opened his mouth, licking his lips.

Then he slammed violently into the engineer, his left shoulder first, sending Tony crashing to the ground with his charge so hard that his vision briefly blacked out. The man was kneeling on him, metal hand pushing down on the arc reactor.

“Do not try to distract me,” he growled, “you won't escape.”

“Wasn't trying to...” the prisoner wheezed, stunned. He could already feel his jaw swelling and it hurt and _what the hell is wrong with this guy?_

But then he noticed the soldier's expression. He didn't look angry, like his tone of voice seemed to imply, but rather scared, his eyes unfocused, as if he was watching something happening far behind Tony. Or inside his own head.

The genius stayed as still as he could while his guard breathed heavily. After a few moments, the pressure on his chest eased and the soldier rocked back on his heels, allowing him to scramble back and rise up on his elbow.

That had been unexpected. And _terrifying_. He had absolutely no idea what had just happened.

The guard was back to his usual impassiveness. He got up, and, as if nothing had happened, lifted the part he had been asked to.

_What the fuck was that all about?_

 

* * *

 

 

He woke up in the middle of the night, and, for once, it wasn't because of his nightmares.

The key word in this sentence being “his”.

The soldier, who was still sitting in his chair, was twitching and muffling small, broken sounds in the heel of his flesh hand. It took Tony a few moments to realize that his eyes were closed: he was still asleep. It was the first time he could see him less than perfectly watchful.

Careful not to make too much noise, the engineer got out of his bed. In the three days he had already been in this place, during which he had been continuously shadowed by the soldier, it was only the second time he had seen the man look human, and he still didn't know what had warranted the first one. What was he dreaming about?

Tony had a thought for his own nightmares, the ones filled with young soldiers and explosions, with stale, icy water and cruel eyes. He reached for the sleeping man.

A fluid motion later, he was thrown against the far wall and slid to the floor, the soldier looming angrily above him. He gasped for air and raised his hands.

“Wow, sorry! I won't do that again!” he cried out, stunned.

The man didn't answer, but he stayed still for long enough that Tony started to tense, expecting a blow that didn't come. Instead, he blinked slowly and went back to the blank indifference that seemed to be his default expression.

“You're an idiot,” he finally said with a small frown. “You'll get yourself killed.”

And for a minute the genius was speechless, because the man's voice had changed, and it wasn't neutral, it was exasperated and fond. And his accent, which until now had been mostly unrecognizable but maybe hinting slightly toward Eastern Europe, was now marked enough for Tony to recognize it as American, likely from New York. As if the soldier had taken someone else's voice and words. And for the first time, the engineer wondered whose they were, and who they were addressed to, because it was certainly not him.

Actually, it raised a lot of new questions: the soldier seemed young, not older than thirty, if you forgot about the dark circles under his eyes. He couldn't have been with HYDRA for very long. Who had he been, before? Where did he come from? Eastern Europe or America? How did he lose his arm?

Of course, Tony had already wondered about his loyalty to HYDRA when he first started working on the chair, and later when it became obvious that its function was to deliver a strong electrical current through someone's brain. He wasn't sure about it, because despite being a genius he still didn't like biology, but he was at least half certain that the part it was meant to target was the hippocampus, and he thought he remembered reading something about the role it played with memory.

So there was definitely a chance that he could get the man to help him if the device didn't work correctly. Which was nice, because it meant that this could actually serve him, even if he still never would have voluntarily repaired what was so obviously a torture instrument.

Of course, there was also the possibility that the HYDRA scientists would know what he was doing, and in that case he was setting himself up for a world of hurt, but he refused to consider it. If they needed him to repair the damages – and they did, no matter what they said – it was highly plausible that he was the only competent engineer they had at hand.

“Go back to bed,” the now-back-to-impassiveness soldier said, interrupting his thoughts.

Nodding, he rose gingerly, mindful of the new bruises he could feel on his back – because after last time that was exactly what he needed... – and laid down under the cover, knowing well that he wouldn't be able to fall back asleep for a long time.

 

* * *

 

 

The following morning, he was taken aback by the arrival of a dozen guards in his little room as soon as he finished his breakfast. Their weapons were drawn, if pointed down.

“Stand down!” the leader barked, raising slightly his rifle.

Tony stayed still, keeping carefully his hands in sight of the newcomers. Eight of them circled the Winter Soldier, who stood up and followed them outside of the room. The engineer sighed internally: apparently, this wasn't about him. Which was probably good news, but he had hoped that maybe the change in routine meant that he would be allowed to take a shower: he hadn't had one since his first day there and he was beginning to _stink_.

But the remaining soldiers, who looked much more relaxed since the others departure, only brought him to the same room as usual, where the man who had shown him the chair in the first place – and who seemed to be running the place, so Tony had taken to calling him “the director” in his head – was waiting for him. Tony steeled himself for an unpleasant conversation at first, but had to hold back a smile when he noticed how uncomfortable the man looked. Was he scared?

“Good morning, Mr. Stark,” he started, probably unaware of how obvious his discomfort was. “How are the repair going?”

 _So that's what this is about_ , the genius thought. _A timeline._ And he would bet his considerable fortune on this sudden urgency being related to the Winter Soldier's strange behavior of late.

“Well, if nothing go wrong I should be done in five days,” he answered with a forced smile.

The man scowled. “I am sure that you could go faster if properly motivated. You will be done in three days, and then you'll be allowed to shower,” he answered with probably as much authority as he could muster, which didn't really impress Tony. He was used to dealing with impossible deadlines set by generals, and knew the value of wildly overestimating how much time he needed. He could do it in three days, but if he had said that in the first place, they would probably have demanded that he __be __done for the next day.

The prospect of a shower was a nice one, too. He had been expecting threats rather than bribery, to be honest. Tony nodded, conscious that his well-being still heavily depended on his compliance, and was relieved when the man, apparently deciding that he was obedient enough, left him with two guards without another word. Ignoring their silent presence in his back, he went back to his work.

It was high time to start repairing the electrodes. It wasn't as if he really needed to put it off any longer: he had convinced a bunch of (uneducated, but that was a minor detail) terrorists that he was building missiles instead of a giant suite of armor; he could rewire the thing discretely. It _would_ hurt like a son of a bitch for anyone unlucky enough to get the thing around their head, but hey, thousands of volts through the cluster of nerves in their nape would still be better than thousands of volts frying their brain... hopefully.

A few hours later, he was surprised by the return of the Winter Soldier, who posted himself in a corner, staring intently at the engineer and ignoring the other guards who seemed to be somewhere between awed and terrified by him and left immediately. His movements were back to the focused efficiency he had displayed during their first meeting, in the desert, an eternity ago.

“Back so soon, sweetheart?” he said with a cheeky smile. “Did you miss me that much?”

He didn't get an answer, but he wasn't really expecting one. He had spent the last few days with the man and had yet to find a way to rile him up. Except for that weird bit when he had asked for his help for the first time, and the previous night, of course. But Tony's chatter and nicknames didn't seem to faze him. The genius took full advantage of it, happy to be able to run his mouth as he pleased without the expectation of a beating when it slipped.

He then noticed the tray the soldier had been carrying and grinned. Food. He started digging in gleefully: they apparently still thought that they didn't need to starve him to force him to comply. _As if threats could break me..._

But after a few mouthfuls, his thoughts took a sudden dark turn: he cringed when he remembered that the only reason why he was currently working and being fed enough, and not curled up in a too cold room like a few days earlier – or worse, because he doubted that he had seen the worst of it – was because of the attack on the base he had been kept in. He wasn't broken, that was a given, but he could have been.

His appetite gone, he pushed the tray away. He had to find a way to get out of there, and soon. His captors resources were low enough that they needed him to work for them; it would probably not last, and if he waited too long, he would be utterly screwed.

At some point, they would ask him for something he wouldn't be willing to provide, and seeing how willing to hurt him they had already been, he really didn't want to know how they would convince him.

On the other hand, giving them the Jericho sounded even worse than giving it to the Ten Rings.

He shuddered and went back to his work, trying to fill his mind with formulas and schematics instead of cold water and car batteries.

 

* * *

 

 

Two days later, Tony nervously connected the last wire. He wasn't scared that he would fail. If anything, it was the most confident he had been for months: unlike the armor he had built in the cave, this was not even a technical challenge. But the previous few days had worn him out. The Winter Soldier behavior had been... erratic, to say the least.

Most of the time, he had been the perfect guard, never letting Tony out of his sight, to the point where Tony wondered whether the soldier had eaten at all during the last week. He probably slept, but apart from that first nightmare, Tony hadn't been able to catch him at it. He never acknowledged the engineer's attempts to talk to him, but was also never really violent, which made for a welcome change. He hadn't spoken for any other reason than to give him orders since the nightmare, and there was no hint in his voice of the American he had sounded like at the time.

But at times, he would stare into the empty space. Tony suspected that he didn't really know the extent of it: he only noticed it when he moved out of his previous line of sight and the man didn't react. And he would knit his brow in an expression that only reminded Tony of a lost child, which was completely stupid since he was well aware how dangerous and utterly terrifying the Winter Soldier could be. Maybe that was Stockholm syndrome finally kicking in...

And on two occasion, the engineer had tried handing him things while he was in this state. He had crushed them when he had jerked back to himself. Literally crushed them, including a steel screwdriver. He tried not to think what would happen if his hand got in the way in this kind of situation.

Regardless, the genius tried very hard to remember that the man was not actually on his side, but between his lack of brutality and the suspicion that he was not the one in control at all, he had a strong tendency to see him as a potential ally. Especially if the chair worked (or in this case didn't) like he hoped it would.

Breathing slowly and hoping that his jumpiness wasn't too apparent, or that it wouldn't seem out of place, he straightened and brushed his hands on his shirt.

“I'm done,” he declared.

A few minutes later, ten guards and the director appeared in the room. They trained their weapons on him at once and Tony raised his hands before being forcefully shoved to his knees.

“I hope for your sake that it works, Mr. Stark,” the director said, a mix of anticipation and nervousness obvious on his face.

The engineer didn't answer, more interested in the arrival of three men in white coats, obviously technicians or doctors, who made a beeline for the chair and started pushing buttons. Blinking lights started to appear and one of them waved his hand, which made the hands that were painfully digging in Tony's shoulders relax fractionally. His repairs looked genuine enough to fool them, then.

“Sir, it is ready for the asset,” one of the technicians said.

“Very well. Wipe him!” the director barked in answer.

Tony turned his eyes in time to see the Winter Soldier – did they really call him “the asset”? – undress with military efficiency, leaving him bare-chested. One of the guards shoved him forward and he stumbled to the chair before sitting in it, face blank.

It was something to suspect who the chair was made for, and another to actually see him in it. Tony felt nauseous. He hadn't thought that they would let him watch, and that wasn't a pleasant surprise.

One of the men in white placed a small piece of rubber in front of the soldier's face, and he took it in his mouth before being shoved backward. He tensed up; the restrains slowly closed around his arms.

As the top started moving, Tony could see the soldier's chest rising and falling more and more quickly. Fascinated and disgusted in equal parts, he saw the electrodes he had been working on a few minutes earlier close around his skull.

For several long moments, it was silent. Too silent. Tony sucked in a breath, about to sigh in relief, thinking maybe he had been wrong, maybe his calculations had been off, maybe the chair wasn't meant to hurt at all -

Then the Winter Soldier screamed.


	3. False move

Tony felt sick. What he had witnessed earlier that day had badly shaken him.

It hadn't really been the pain of the soldier; that he had expected. No, it was his behavior after being freed from the chair. The engineer thought that he would pass out, or be catatonic, or even fight at least a little against his handlers: not be so utterly _pliant_. The soldier had seemed as weak and lost as a newborn, but when the men in white ordered him to get up, he instantly obeyed and left the room between two guards who were only half supporting him. After what they had done to him, despite the pain, he still kept obeying them...

Tony knew about blind obedience, the kind expected from soldiers in the army: he had grown up almost surrounded by military men. But that was something else. He had heard about brainwashing, of course. It didn't make witnessing the results easier.

After that, as promised, he had been allowed to shower, watched by a few guards, and had managed to wait to be alone in front of the toilets before throwing up.

Now he was curled on his bed, one hand on his mouth, attempting to physically hold back the nausea that was still rising. Strangely, he had been left alone inside. He knew that there were guards posted behind the closed door and he could see cameras in the corners, so they weren't really taking any chances, but he still wondered what had warranted the decrease in security.

The director, apparently satisfied by his work, had promised him that he would start on something else the next morning. Of course, it was nice to know that he hadn't outlived his usefulness, but he didn't want to work on another torture device.

He raised his head when the door of his cell opened, and was stunned to discover the Winter Soldier standing in the doorway. After a few seconds, the man closed the door behind him and went to his chair.

_Are they fucking serious? What are they playing at?_

It made no sense at all. The soldier was clearly well enough to stand by himself, which was completely impossible given the voltage he had received, but why send him – their best fighter, given the caution which he was treated with – to watch Tony, who had no way to get out by himself and nowhere to go? If they didn't trust him enough to stay in his monitored and guarded cell, where he had access to nothing technological (apart from the arc reactor, but he needed it to live and it wouldn't last long anyway after powering the armor if he put any kind of strain on it), then why would they let him work on any of their tech?

The soldier was perfectly still, but Tony could hear his breathing. It was scary, how long he could remain in one position without moving at all. He, who had never been able to stay more than a few minutes in one place without fidgeting, could not fathom the amount of patience this man had.

He laid in bed for what felt like an hour, still unable to sleep, not helped the slightest by the presence of a man who would be entitled to hate him now and could probably kill him with his left thumb.

Suddenly, a small, choked sound reached his ears. He frowned slightly, realizing slowly that he could no longer hear the soldier's breathing. He raised himself cautiously, and was strangely relieved to see the man still sitting in his seat. His metal hand was pressed against his own mouth in a bruising grip.

“Hey”, Tony said quietly, “are you alright?”

It was a stupid question and he knew it. The man was _anything_ but alright, it was obvious. While his back was still perfectly straight, what little of his face wasn't hidden behind his hand was tensed in pain.

The only sound that escaped him was a continuous muffled litany that Tony couldn't understand before coming closer.

“Please stop please stop please stop _please stop please stop-_ ”

He startled back, his nails biting into his palm. What the hell was he supposed to do? He had no idea where the soldier thought he was, but it was probably not there, and had no experience with this kind of situations. Yinsen would have known what to do. Tony didn't: he was a fuck-up, not a doctor.

Yet he couldn't even consider leaving him to it. Guilt was gnawing at him. He knew that whatever it was, it probably had to do with the chair. How could it not? The soldier's screams were still burnt into his memories...

He got out of the bed with slow movements, careful even if the man didn't look able to register his presence. He had learned from the last nightmare and didn't try to touch him, but instead crouched in front of him and tried talking to him.

“Hey, whatever you are remembering, your not there anymore, please look at me... There is nobody else around and you could probably kill me with you pinkie, you know that? Come on...”

He kept babbling, not really paying attention to what he was saying, for a good ten minutes. His throat was starting to ache because although he was quiet, it was the most he had said since Yinsen's death. There wasn't anything nice about the scene he was looking at: he could see the soldier's metal finger digging into his own cheeks, and after a while blood started leaking from behind his hand, probably from his lips. Yet he felt almost... _good_ , especially as the soldier's breathing started evening out and his moans stopped. He attributed this improvement to his feeling useful and helping someone else, not pausing to consider any other explanation ( _now you're no longer the most fucked-up person in the room_ _ **shut up it's not like that**_ ).

After several more minutes, the soldier let his hand fall away from his face. Predictably enough, it was bruised, with marked indents in his skin, and his lips were bitten bloody. He opened his eyes and focused them on the engineer.

“What the-” he started before stopping himself, looking bewildered.

There it was, this New-Yorker drawl Tony had heard once before. The genius stopped rambling, relieved.

“Are you okay?” he asked, unsure what he was supposed to do now. What was the etiquette in this kind of situations?

“You... Who are you?” the soldier asked, a bemused dent in his forehead.

Tony stared. _What the hell am I supposed to answer to that? Hello, I'm your prisoner?_

He settled for “You don't remember?”

“I, uh, no,” he answered, still dumbfounded. “My head hurts.”

“That's... not unexpected,” Tony winced, still feeling guilty. “Will you...”

His voice trailed to nothing as he saw  the soldier's lost expression disappear  in a matter of seconds into his usual blank face. The man absently rubbed his temples once before turning back toward him.

“What are you doing? Go back to bed,” he ordered with a small frown.

Stunned by how fast things had gone back to normal,  Tony wisely decided that he was not going to defy his guard tonight and climbed in his bed in silence, sneaking glances toward him. It was as if the last twenty minutes hadn't happened. Did the guy have multiple personalities? Actually, that made sense. He didn't know much about mental illnesses, but he didn't need to to see that the  kid had a few loose screws. Maybe that was what was wrong with him, and the chair had been part of some sort of electroshock therapy.

_Right, and those guys aren't_ _Nazis_ _, just_ _philanthropists_ _trying to help him._

Anyway,  he really liked the New-Yorker better than the emotionless HYDRA goon. He only hoped that he would have more occasion to see him in the near future.

 

* * *

 

 

In the morning, Tony was lead to a room he had never been in before. It looked a lot like the one with the chair – the engineer was starting to think that this building hadn't been built with a focus on diversity, or, for that matter, on esthetic – but this time the thing he was supposed to repair was some sort of tank equipped with an impressive amount of medical captors and... a cooling system? What the fuck?

So the bad news was that he had no idea what he was doing and whether he should also try and sabotage it. Or how he could.

The _very_ good news was that it was significantly more complex than the chair, which meant that he wasn't working with two wrenches and three screwdrivers anymore. The circuitry of the thing was completely fried: he needed new wires, and he had a power source for the soldering iron. And he wouldn't need much to built a small radio, strong enough to send a message up to a hundred miles away in the right conditions. If he was lucky, he could reach someone from the army or something similar. He knew that no matter which country he was in, he was famous and important enough that he could warrant a rescue mission.

So the future was definitely looking brighter.

Of course, the director had expressed his hast to see the device repaired, but there hadn't been any threats this time, so Tony guessed that they weren't in a real hurry like they had been with the chair.

He had been separated from his usual guard as soon as he was up, and was instead supervised by two goons who seemed bored to death and only half focused on what he was doing, which was perfect because it meant that he could sneak small pieces of equipment he needed and hide them in a corner of the structure of the tank. He wasn't going to spend too much time at once on it – he wasn't stupid and knew how suspicious it would look – but the thing was massive enough that it could easily mask his hands while he pretended to work on the cooling unit in its base.

While he studied the parts of the thing that he could recognize, and they didn't seem like they could hurt anyone, he wondered what its function was. The tank was empty, but it was probably supposed to be filled with liquid, or maybe some kind of gel. It could be used to preserve things, like a fridge, maybe? But then it lacked a lid to close it... On the other hand, there were empty hinges on the side, so it had probably been taken off. And what could be so important that they would need to save this particular device from the base they had fled? It wasn't even that complicated, he couldn't see any part that couldn't be found pretty easily on the internet, there was no special component that was that hard to acquire, even legally... And it wasn't even containing anything at the moment, that was what made it so strange.

He was so lost in his own head that he didn't notice the Winter Soldier returning and the other guards leaving before hearing the loud crash of dishes breaking on the floor. He jumped and whirled around, his hand instinctively coming to cover the arc reactor.

The soldier was standing there, frozen, his eyes wide open in silent horror. He had been carrying a tray, probably with Tony's lunch on it, but while the grip of his left hand had stayed steady, his right one had let it go and the tray was now dangling uselessly against his thigh while the food had fallen to the floor.

Half trying to understand what had happened and half bracing for an attack or a punishment, Tony stayed there, perfectly motionless, for several seconds before reacting. He took a few steps back and raised his hands.

“Whoa, what's happening, big guy? I didn't do anything!” he exclaimed frantically.

The soldier didn't seem to hear him and let go completely of the tray, which clattered loudly on the floor. Soundlessly, he walked to the tank, passing and ignoring Tony, and bent above it, his hands coming to rest almost reverently on its edge. His face showed a naked mix of fear and anticipation, and his hand were tensed so hardthat the left one was already denting the steel slightly. The knuckles on his flesh hand were stark white from the strain.

He didn't seem to be violent, but if the last few days had taught Tony one thing, it was that the soldier was about as stable and predictable as a wild horse: he backed until he was as far from him as he could without leaving the room. Beside, even if the man himself didn't attack him, he wasn't sure that people from HYDRA like the director wouldn't accuse him of causing this new development.

Which, now that he thought about it, might not be completely wrong. He _had_ rendered the chair harmless.

But nobody came into the room, and after a while, the soldier's stare lost its focus, his expression relaxing slowly, until he was only standing there with his hands hanging loosely at his sides.

He eventually turned his gaze to Tony, who shuddered although it wasn't hostile. The soldier pointedly looked back to the tank, then to the engineer.

“Okay, okay, I'm coming...” the genius grumbled, cautiously approaching the device and the guard.

When nothing happened, he resumed his working halfheartedly, his mind going at full speed. What did the tank usually contain? Probably something of importance to the soldier... It was big enough to fit a tall human, but its content could have been far smaller.

Great, another riddle. Exactly what he needed.

 

* * *

 

 

Tony was on his back on the ground. It might sound uncomfortable, but at the moment, it wasn't bothering him enough for him to register it through his anticipation.

“Come on...” he gritted through his teeth, fiddling with the mechanism of the device, a small metal box with a dial on it.

Suddenly, the small blinking red light turned green. He barely repressed a loud cry of joy. The signal was sent.

Now he only had to hide it, and that was easy. He was hidden under the tank, he could screw the radio in a corner and it would be impossible to see it without crawling.

Suddenly, he heard the door of the room open and almost knocked himself out by jumping and hitting his head.

“Fuck...” he growled.

He got out of his hiding spot and on his feet in a few seconds, in time to see the director, who had come with a few guards, close the door behind himself.

He had no idea why they were there, but it couldn't be good. He had been very cautious about it, but they could have caught him, it was always a possibility.

With a quick glance, he made sure that the soldier wasn't spacing out. It happened more and more often every day, and if the chair had been supposed to fix that, then the engineer had to make sure that nobody noticed it. But the man's eyes were trained on him, like they usually were.

“Can I help you?” he asked with the plastic smile he had perfected for nosy journalists and arrogant congressmen.

“I just wanted to make sure that you had everything you needed,” the director answered, his voice saccharine but his eyes sharp.

The man looked around the room, his gaze lingering briefly on the soldier, who didn't pay him any attention, his eyes still fixed on Tony. The engineer frowned, surprised by the intensity of his focus. Even if he rarely ever spoke, the soldier usually reacted when his superior was nearby.

Not willing to take any risk, Tony decided to keep the director's attention focused on him. If they knew about the radio, he would know by now. Probably because it would hurt _a lot_ , but he was trying not to think about this eventuality.

“Of course I do,” Tony answered easily, “I mainly need time to understand how this thing work... It would help if you told me what it is supposed to do.”

“I don't think that you really need to know that,” the director shot back with a sharp smile. “I'm sure that you can guess.”

Instinctively, Tony's fingers went to his arc reactor and started tapping a pattern. If they wouldn't tell him, it meant that it was bad. Unfortunately, unlike last time, he had no idea what the global function of the thing was, and thus didn't know how he could make it dysfunction discreetly.

However, his thoughtful silence was too long and the director's eyes went back to the soldier, whose eyes were still locked toward Tony but had lost part of their focus.

 _Shit, he's doing it again!_ Tony realized that the man had probably been looking toward him before his mind slipped away, which meant that if the engineer moved – or if the director asked him anything – they would very sound find out about it.

“No, really,” he said hurriedly, frantically trying to think of something to say. “You might as well be asking me to build you a thing that flies, but not telling me if it needs to be an airplane, or a helicopter, or a hovercraft, or whether it runs on gas, or diesel, or is _solar powered_ , should I be space conscious, or do you want room for a quickie in the back? I need _details_ , not even I can make bricks without clay.”

The director's eyebrows rose to his hairline and his lips thinned in a coldly amused smile, but Tony had reached his goal. Now the director's and the guards attentions were on him.

“I think that you don't fully appreciate your situation, Mr. Stark,” the former answered. “You _will_ repair this, and you are in no position to make demands. I think that you do not need any more information to comply. Maybe a reminder of your place would be beneficial.”

He snapped his fingers – seriously, could he act _more_ like a villain from a B-rated movie? – and one of the guards stepped forward. Tony braced himself, already cringing.

The first blow was expected but no less painful. The second one threw him to the floor; he instantly curled on himself, his knees protecting his stomach and his arms in front of his face. He was getting pretty good at taking beating, and wasn't that a depressing thought?

Well, that told him one thing: if he was going to persist in helping the Winter Soldier, which was a gambit in itself because he couldn't be sure that the man would help him back instead of selling him out, he definitely needed deflecting tactics that didn't end up with him acting as a punching-ball...

 

* * *

 

Two days later, still sore from his last beating, Tony was woken up by being roughly shoved to the ground by two guards. He blinked wearily, unable to resist as they shackled his hands behind his back. They pulled him upright, and he barely managed to get his feet under him before they started marching him to the tank room.

The director was waiting for him there.

In his hands, a small metal device that blinked red.

Tony's eyes widened. He felt breathless, as if the guards had already started the beating he could feel coming.

“Hello, Mr. Stark,” he greeted him with a cold, hard smile. “You are an engineering genius, aren't you? Then maybe you could explain to me what this is, and what kind of message it is sending...”

 _Fuck_.

 


	4. Back to the drawing board

Tony was frozen on his feet. They had found him out.

He saw the director's lips move, but couldn't hear him over the thundering of his heart. He felt like the ground had been swept out from under his feet, and he was in free fall: for now, everything seemed to be happening far away, but he knew without a doubt that he was going to hurt _a lot_ and _very soon_.

His mind was whirling, trying to imagine what was awaiting him. He didn't think that they would kill him: they needed him too much, and if they wanted to, they could have put a bullet in his head at any point of time. But they would punish him. How?

They didn't have anyone to use as leverage against him, so torture, probably. A beating was unlikely, because it would have to be too serious and would risk damaging him too much. They wouldn't risk touching his head, or his hands, for that matter.

Not for the first time since his capture, Tony wished that he wasn't a genius – it would certainly make the rest of his life much _nice_ , not being able to picture in exacting detail the myriad of ways in which he could be tortured, twisted and mangled, but still function.

He was brutally shoved forward by the two guards that stood behind him and stumbled before following them, stumbling over his own feet. They took him to another room, one he had never been in but whose function was pretty obvious. A hook was stuck in the far wall; on the side, a tray covered in sharp instruments glistened ominously. He was trying not to think about the fact that there were gutters in the floor, because there was only one kind of fluid you could expect to stain the tiles in a room like this.

The guards marched him to the wall and untied his hands long enough to raise them above his head, where they were fastened to the hook. In this position, his entire front was exposed to whatever punishment they saw fit to deliver.

The director walked slowly to him, the Winter Soldier trailing behind. With a condescending smile, he raised the small radio that was going to cost him so much to Tony's eyes.

“Did you really think that we wouldn't notice it?” he asked. “You are not nearly as subtle as you think you are, Mr. Stark. This was useless. There is no one close enough to help you.”

He let go of the device, which fell to floor with a rather pathetic _thud_ , and the engineer sagged into his bonds. His chances of escaping had already been thin enough, but now they had dwindled to nothing.

“Now, Mr. Stark, you need to understand that the only reason why you are alive today is because HYDRA let you live. And we cannot tolerate such behavior. Asset, the pliers,” he ordered, obviously far too pleased with his little show.

Tony's face drained of all color as the soldier went obediently to the tray and selected the aforementioned tool. Then the metal-armed man kneltdown at the genius' feet.

Tony couldn't breathe, couldn't think through his panic. It was like the cave... No, it was far worse, because this time he had _nothing_ that they wanted. He couldn't negotiate to make them stop. They would hurt him as long as they wished to. He had reached the end of his luck: there was nothing he could do, no miraculous invention, no smart retort, no money between them and him.

The soldier inserted one end of his tool under the nail of the engineer's big toe and started to apply pressure.

Tony started howling and begging instantly, all concept of pride or dignity forgotten.

He didn't stop until his voice broke completely, and then dropped away to small whimpers.

The soldier kept going.

 

* * *

 

When they took him off the hook, he fell gracelessly to the floor. He ignored the shouted orders to get up, barely able to even register them and knowing that any attempt to put weight on his feet was doomed to fail. Instead, he curled on himself, his forehead hidden against his knees, his eyes closed against the outside. Everything around him was so loud and painful that he could only try to shield himself against the light and wait the agony out. He was mindlessly hoping that if he made himself small enough, they would forget about him.

After a while, they stopped talking. He had an instant to be relieved before being pulled fluidly over someone's shoulder. Probably the soldier's, given the metal that was now digging painfully into his stomach.

The move wasn't brutal in itself, but the engineer was on his last nerve: he started silently sobbing, unable to stop. It didn't really matter, after all, it wasn't as if he had any dignity left to protect.

Tony kept his eyes screwed shut until the metal-armed man put him down on his bed, where he curled back. Apparently, his punishment was over. That was fortunate, but he couldn't really enjoy the freedom since he still had trouble forming thoughts. The pain had been terrible, but at some point it had stopped mattering, and now he felt like he was floating outside of his body, disconnected of the sensations and emotions he knew he was experiencing.

He could move, but it felt as if he was struggling in thick cotton. He could hear and feel, but it came through a heavy haze and he couldn't gather the energy to concentrate on anything. Intellectually, he knew that this kind of mindset wasn't really healthy, that it should worry him, but it was so much _easier_. Not having to care. Some sort of respite after the constant pain of the last few months.

As he came slowly back to himself, the first sensation that drew his attention was oddly... nice. Maybe it did so because it was so out of place: it was without a doubt the nicest thing he had felt since Yinsen had died. There were fingers in his hair, petting him softly, untangling the curls and scratching his scalp.

And _that_ was what it took to bring him to tears, something he had blessedly managed to avoid until now. Painless human contact. It sounded pathetic ( _it_ _ **was –**_ _Stark men are made of iron you don't need_ _ **that**_ ).

The hand didn't stop. After a while, Tony's sobbing slowed down, though his eyes were still flowing abundantly. He could hear someone talking next to his ear.

“Come on, Stevie, breathe,” the voice said, “you can do it. Breathe with me.”

A few slow, deep inspirations followed. The engineer did his best to obey, and soon his sobbing subsided completely, allowing him to realize how heavy his chest felt: it was much worse than the usual weight of the arc reactor. He had probably been hyperventilating.

But when he raised his head, the soldier flinched and his hands jerked away from him, pushing him back. Tony whimpered at the loss and the spike of pain the movement brought. The soldier's eyes cleared and his lips thinned in a displeased line, but smoothed soon in a reassuring smile. Before Tony could get his bearings back, the man bent down to gather him in a one armed hug. Stunned and lost, Tony let his head rest on the other's shoulder, unable to decide how he should react. In addition of his thick fog his thoughts still had to wade through, he couldn't even remember the last time someone had hugged him. Even Rhodey at his drunkest didn't go that far.

After a few seconds, his hands came to rest on the man's back, but apart from that, he had no idea what he was doing. He was fairly certain that the man who was touching him was The American, as he had taken to calling him, the one who talked like a New-Yorker and seemed not to know where he was; he couldn't imagine in which situation the otherwise emotionless and perfectly competent soldier would act this way.

And he was still talking, a continuous ramble too low for Tony to understand everything, but which sounded like a litany of reassurances, the kind that could be used to soothe a sick child. But... Had he called the engineer _Stevie_?

Nervous, the genius almost started fidgeting before being brusquely reminded why he had been crying in the first place. His nail-less toes had brushed against the rough fabric of the bedding, forcing a whine of distress out of him. Now that he wasn't so removed from his sensations anymore, he felt every thread of agony coming from his feet and had to bury his face in the soldier's neck to keep from crying out.

Without missing a beat, the man started rubbing Tony's back, comforting in his very solid presence.

The genius had no idea how he managed to drift off after that, but the soldier hadn't let go of him when he woke up.

 

* * *

 

Several days later, Tony still hadn't resumed working. It could have been a worrying sign that his usefulness was being rethought, but he knew that it wasn't what this was about. It had probably a lot more to do with the fact that he still couldn't get out of his bed.

His feet were red and swollen and still ached so bad that the slightest contact with anything other than air on his battered toes was excruciating, but now he was also burning from a fever that showed no sign of abating. He was half delirious most of the time. He was almost certain that at some point a doctor had come to check on him, and had been hooked on an IV he had displaced at least four times since (not on purpose, though he probably would have if he could) but his state hadn't improved. If anything, it was getting worse.

He knew that they had starved him during the first two weeks he had spent in the other HYDRA base and since then he had never been allowed to recover completely, so it stood to reason that he would be weak, but the traumatic circumstances in which he had been hurt were doubtlessly also to blame: he honestly didn't know if he was going to heal. At this point, death felt like a very real possibility – one that, even if it didn't make him proud, wasn't nearly as appalling as it had been a few days earlier. Even if he didn't die, he would only stay there, as a prisoner of HYDRA – or worse, if their knowledge of brainwashing was as thorough as the existence of the Winter Soldier seemed to imply. He done what he could to escape, but it hadn't been enough. Maybe it would be simpler to just stop trying and throw himself on some guard's weapon.

The soldier, on the other hand, was getting better and more coherent every day. He hadn't left Tony's bedside for longer than a few minutes at a time (between the two of them, the air of the room smelt bad enough that anyone not living here kept their nose scrunched up the whole time they were inside), and while at first most of it had been spent staring at the walls, his range of facial expression had soon expanded to include a confused one – he wore that one a _lot –_ and a pained one that apparently came from the vicious headaches he frequently suffered.

Tony had some ideas about what they came from, but lately he wondered if they weren't also a sign that the soldier was healing. He looked more human every day. And, to his great surprise, while he usually stayed silent, his reaction to the engineer's distress the first time hadn't been a one off. Now all it took was for Tony to have trouble breathing – whether it was from the pain, or from those terrifying episodes when he couldn't say where he was anymore, the cave, the cold room and the base blending in a swirl of panic and terror – for the soldier to start talking to him like a child, comforting him with soft words and softer touches.

He still called him Stevie, though, so you could probably bet that the man wasn't completely conscious of their surroundings at those times.

Fortunately, when the doctors came they stayed focused on Tony and the soldier mostly ignored them, so for now nobody seemed to have noticed his strange behavior. Although why the cameras hadn't picked it up, he didn't know, but since he was still alive and they hadn't been separated, he had deduced that they weren't monitored.

But today seemed different. Tony felt coherent, the fever and the pain weren't too high for him to handle, and for the last thirty minutes the soldier's eyes hadn't left his face. It was pretty unnerving.

The silence stretched on; while in his usual state Tony would have said anything to avoid it, now he couldn't gather the energy to care. After all, when had speaking done him any good, recently?

Suddenly, the deep, raspy voice of the soldier broke his train of thought.

“Who are you?” he asked simply. His face seemed devoid of any malice, his eyes genuinely curious, if guarded.

Tony nearly jumped out of his skin. It was the first time the soldier addressed him while sounding conscious of where they were _and_ while sounding like the American. The engineer fumbled for an answer.

“My name is Tony Stark. Who are _you_?” he asked back, curious.

“Stark?” the man frowned instead of answering. “Like Howard?”

 _Have you lived under a rock for the last two decades, man?_ He bit back the retort, both very surprised by the reply – these days, he was a _lot_ more famous than his father – and aware that he was still at the other's mercy. Of course, there was also the fact that for all he knew, the man hadn't been out of a base for a long time, and that keeping him informed had probably been the last of HYDRA's priorities, but let's be honest, tact had never stopped him from being rude before.

“In a way, yes,” he answered instead, ignoring his irritation caused by the mention of his Howard. “He was my father.”

“Your _father_?” the soldier exclaimed. “That's impossible, you're older than...”

His voice trailed to nothing and for a minute Tony feared that he had relapsed into his mindless soldier's personality (if you could call _that_ a personality). But the man blinked hard and spoke again.

“What year is it?” he asked in a faraway voice, his eyes shifting restlessly around the room, as if he was afraid of the answer.

“2009”, Tony replied with a frown. “What year did you think it was?”

“ _2009?!”_ the soldier shouted. Well, that was definitely not what he had been hoping for, if his anguished look was any indication. But what could he have expected? How long had he been in HYDRA's hands? He wasn't that old, but if he knew Howard better than Tony, it meant that it had been more than fifteen years. And older than who? Definitely not Howard, who would have been ninety years old by now. He had probably been more than sixty by the time the soldier had been born, and while Tony was ready to believe that his time as a captive probably hadn't improved his looks, he was still only thirty seven.

But the soldier had apparently already recovered from the shock.

“Where are we?” was the next question he asked, his brow furrowed. His flesh hand had come to rest on his temple.

“Hum, seriously, you don't know?” the engineer retorted drily, because seriously, _this place is run by Nazis and I'm your prisoner_ was a sentence he _really_ didn't want to have to say. “Well... Have you ever heard of HYDRA?”

The soldier's reaction was instant. His eyes widened, his lips thinned, his jaw clenched. He knew them and he didn't like them.

At this point, Tony was almost ready to admit that HYDRA had been mind-controlling him with magic, because none of this made sense: maybe it was possible to bend someone's mind enough for him to become a mere puppet to people he hated – the engineer knew first hand exactly how effective torture could be – and he was almost certain that the chair had been wiping his memories, but then it should have taken a lot more time and efforts for him to get his memories and agency back. Especially if he had been there for more than ten years.

Well, if he was going to trust the guy and rely on him to get out of there, and that was his intention, he needed to know more about him.

“Who are you?” he asked again. “I'll try to explain whatever I know to you but it would be nice if you could at least tell me your name.”

The man blinked again and frowned. “I... I'm not sure,” he answered after a beat. “I don't remember much. I think... James. I... I know that I hate HYDRA. I think that at some point I have been fighting them, but... My memories aren't clear. They... They hurt me.”

Tony was ready to believe him. He looked completely lost. James? He could work with that.

“Then you will want to get out of here. We are in one of their bases, and you were supposed to guard me, I think,” he started, deciding that the man was unlikely to betray him. “I have tried to find a way out, but... It didn't really work out for me. I was hoping that maybe you had some ideas...”

“Guard you? That's... Yes, that makes sense. It's strange, I had no idea what this place was, but I know the layout of the building, or at least where I could find weapons and an exit,” the soldier said with a puzzled expression. “That could help. But you are sick.”

Tony groaned. Now that he could finally hope for an escape, he wasn't going to let himself be stopped by something as stupid as his health. After all, it was probably way better to be dying from it out of there than to rest in this place.

“I'll get better, don't worry, I'm good at ignoring these kind of things,” he deflected, his finger coming to rest on the arc reactor, thinking about the multiple times Pepper had had to drag him out of his workshop before he passed out from hunger, exhaustion, or on one occasion, a nasty infection (don't wipe an open wound, even a minor one, with a rag Dummy gave you, it is _not safe_ ). “If we could avoid firefights and explosions, that would be great, but otherwise I should be able to follow you. But we can't wait for too long.”

“I'll think about it, then,” James allowed with a shrug. “If you're sure about it.”

He apparently had nothing more to say and Tony tried to resist the urge to speak for a whole five minutes – it wasn't the time to show how annoying he could be – but didn't last long. After all, he was curious, and entitled to some explanations.

“By the way, you talked about 'Stevie',” he started casually. “Should we be looking for him on our way out?”

The soldier's face closed so suddenly that Tony shut up and winced, half expecting a blow.

“Who the hell is Stevie?” he growled, his voice dead and cold and his tone suggesting that the whole conversation was over.

 


	5. Can of worms

When the doctors came back, James still hadn't uttered a word, but it was clear to anyone who looked at him that he wasn't in his usual impassive state. His eyes were unfocused and, more obvious, his flesh hand was gripping the sheets of the bed.

Tony couldn't think of anything he could do that would distract them from noticing it, and wasn't willing to throw himself under the bus to protect the soldier like he had already done once: his body couldn't take it. He could only watch, helpless, as one of the doctors stared at the misbehaving member.

“Status report,” he barked.

James lifted his head, his gaze vacant, and didn't answer.

“The asset's programming is degrading much faster than we anticipated,” the doctor frowned. “Take him to his technicians, he is to be wiped and reset. We have to put him back under as soon as possible.”

Immediately, one of the guards posted at the door approached the soldier and put a hand on his shoulder, his sidearm still holstered; nobody in the room could have anticipated that the usually docile man would hurl him against the wall, where a loud cracking sound indicated that he would be staying down.

A second later, every single weapon in the room was pointed at James.

Frozen by fear and surprise, Tony could only watch as one of the remaining guards shouted something in his comm, summoning the director who came through the door mere minutes later. Following his outburst, James had stayed as still as a statue, ignoring the bustle around him. The director stopped in front of him and growled,

“Status report!”

Once again, the soldier didn't react. He barely blinked when the director backhanded him viciously, while Tony winced in sympathy. The director frowned, his expression a mix of anger and badly-concealed dread.

“This is bad, sir,” the doctor who had first reacted said. “The efficiency of the wiping process is plummeting. The asset has been out of cryofreeze too long, and his healing factor is taking over much faster than we thought, the programming is breaking down...”

“Well, you know perfectly well that there is nothing we can do about it for now. The usual maintenance will have to do. Tell them to be very thorough, we need him to be docile, not fully operational.”

The doctor gestured to the guards and half of them marched the Winter Soldier out of the room, keeping at gun point at all time. Tony's mind was reeling. Cryofreeze? Had he really heard them? He had no idea anyone had the technology needed to keep someone alive and frozen... And that would explain why he had thought of Howard when he heard the name Stark. Though it meant that he had actually been a prisoner for at least a few decades... And the way they talked about him, calling him 'the asset', talking about 'programming'...It made him nauseous. They probably thought of him as a uniquely high maintenance weapon.

Then his intellect caught up with what he had just learned and he had to fight the urge to throw up. Cryofreeze. What did they need to keep him frozen? Probably some kind of tank in which they could lower the temperature as much as they wanted, big enough to contain the soldier, and with enough medical equipment to monitor his vitals at least during the freezing and the thawing process...

Well, he had wondered what the device he had been repairing did. Now the soldier's fascination with the tank made a lot more sense.

Just as he reached this conclusion, the director gestured to the remaining guards and two of them grabbed the arms of the engineer, dragging him out of his bed and across the cold floor, mindless of his abused feet. Still feverish, Tony couldn't stop his teeth from chattering while they lead him to the room he had been working in (on a cryofreeze unit, he still couldn't wrap his mind around that one). They put him in front of the small table on which he usually left his tool and held his hands splayed down on it.

 _I thought we were done with the fucking torture_ , he thought helplessly, already knowing where this was headed. So much for them not touching my hands...

It was stupid, stupid and counterproductive. He wasn't even sure that he would survive another session. Of course, they were probably getting very desperate, but they had to have at least some common sense left! Walking with nail-less feet was painful, working with nail-less hands was impossible, it would completely fuck-up his fine motor control...

But this time, they didn't bring the pliers out. One of the doctors had a scalpel in his hands. He put the sharp edge against Tony's left little finger. Tony's breath froze in his lungs.

_Fuck fuck fuck please don't do that..._

The director was sweating. He had completely lost his composure. He was panicked, that much was obvious.

It didn't really bring much comfort to Tony, who was an order away from losing a finger...

“We need this unit to work in five days, Mr. Stark,” the director ordered. “After that, you'll lose a knuckle every day. I am certain that with the right motivation, you can do this.”

His face white with the strain of not moving and keeping his mouth shut, Tony didn't dare even nodding. He wasn't sure that he could do so without breaking down completely: his mind was already all over the place, the room was spinning around him and he couldn't breathe enough air. He was surprised that he wasn't already begging them to let him out of the water: he still wasn't caught in a flashback, but their voices were too loud, and their hands so heavy in his hair, and how many different languages were they speaking?

Who was he kidding? He was completely having flashbacks.

Five days. He couldn't do it. Anything shorter than a week was impossible, especially in his state. In his workshop, with JARVIS and all his tools and bots, and with the possibility of spending the whole night working, he could have done it in three days, maybe less; but here, with second-rate tools that lacked precision and having to stop every few minutes for his feet, with his balance completely shot by his health?

If he didn't find a way out in the next five days...

Well, he already had only half a sternum left, so how bad was a shorter pinkie?

 

* * *

 

The next morning, the Winter Soldier still hadn't come back from wherever the doctors had taken him. It meant that Tony was watched by three normal guards, and the difference was painfully obvious. The soldier had never threatened him – not directly, anyway: he just loomed, confident enough in his strength to know that the engineer wasn't going to try anything. But the other guards weren't like that: they were nervous, and therefore brutal. He had already taken the barrel of a gun in his ribs because his feet didn't allow him to walk as fast as they wanted him to. His jaw still ached from the punch he had gotten for his aggravated retort.

He was working now, but while before he had been more or less left to his own devices, he was now held at gunpoint at all time. They were in the way, too, and wouldn't pass him his tools when he asked for them, unlike what the soldier had done. He had to work in silence: he was pretty sure that his usual constant chatter would wear their patience out very soon.

But keeping his thoughts to himself was hard, and of course, the first sentence that bypassed his brain-to-mouth filter wasn't about the technicalities of the cooling unit...

“Goddammit, get out of my way!” he growled at one of them who kept standing between the tank and the desk.

Then he froze, because his brain had caught up with his tongue.

There was a beat of silence, and the guard stepped towards him. Tony took a step back. He was so _fucked_.

“You Americans are so arrogant,” the guard started, spitting 'Americans' as someone else would have said 'crawly little things living in the sewers'. “Maybe you need to be reminded of your place.”

Tony backed off until his calf bumped into the tank, cursing his tongue and raising his arms to protect his face. Why the hell couldn't he just shut up? At this rate, he was going to die before the five days were up... The guards obviously hated him, he really didn't need to give them an excuse to beat him up!

He jumped when he heard something crash in the tank beside him, and was yanked forward. He opened his eyes and saw the guard sprawled on the tank, eyes closed and blood running down his temple.

James was there, and he was glaring murderously at the others, his hands protectively coming to rest on Tony's shoulders.

“You have orders, do not touch him,” he growled. “Get out.”

They scrambled away, carrying their unconscious comrade between them.

“Are you alright?” the soldier asked Tony, putting his right hand on the engineer's jaw. Tony couldn't say if he was shaking, or if the other's hand was unsteady. “You are bruised...”

“That's from yesterday,” the genius shrugged. “Are you alright? What did they do?”

“You did something to the chair, didn't you?” the soldier answered, tilting his head. “It didn't work. I'm... more clear-headed now. Anyway, I think better when I have something to do... Like protect you.”

“That's great,” Tony said tiredly. The adrenaline was draining out of him and everything was starting to hurt. “So, regarding our last conversation, do you actually have any idea about how we're going to get the hell out of there? Because they don't seem to trust me much anymore – I can't imagine why, really – and it's getting pretty urgent...”

“Well, I know the layout of the base so I could get some weapons and find the exits. There aren't that many guards around because it's not a normal base, they were hit pretty hard by the attack two weeks ago, we should take advantage of that. But I don't think that we should move before you're done with repairing that thing, so we aren't really in a hurry,” James explained, apparently oblivious to Tony's growing hysteria. “Besides, they are going to watch me closely, so we have to be extra cautious...”

“That's a very good point,” Tony answered, biting back the cold panic that was setting in his chest, “but that's not what I mean. We have five days, after that, they... Well, they really want it done, and I won't be fast enough. And I don't think that you want me to repair that.”

“Why?” the soldier frowned curiously. “What is this thing?”

Tony paused. “You don't know?” he asked.

“No, I'm no engineer,” James shrugged. “Is it a weapon?”

“No, it's... Listen, it's not important, because we need to get out of there before it becomes relevant,” Tony retorted, his patience wearing thin. He didn't have the time to find out about what the soldier knew, even if his previous reaction, when he had first started to work on it, had been... peculiar, to say the least. “Do you know how many guards are around?”

“About thirty, I'd say, they work in shifts,” James answered. “I could take them all out, but not keep you safe at the same time, and I don't think that you have any training. We can't just go charging ahead.”

“Great,” Tony sighed. “Aren't they going to ask questions after your little outburst when you arrived here? We are not exactly supposed to be best buddies...”

“My mission is to protect you, so I don't think that it will be a problem,” James answered easily. “Let's start planning. Are you any good with explosives?”

Tony grinned slowly. Things were looking up again. “I might know a thing or two about them.”

 

* * *

 

Tony woke up to the sound of hitched breathing. It was the middle of the night, the lights were off, but he recognized James' voice in the small sobbing noises that escaped him from time to time.

Was he awake or having a nightmare? Unsure of what he should do, Tony sit on the edge of his bed and extended a hand toward him.

“James?” he called softly.

“Sorry!” came the muffled answer.

Definitely awake, then. The engineer put a tentative hand on the soldier's knee.

“Are you okay? What's happening?” he asked, worried.

“I'm so sorry!” James only repeated, jerking away from his touch. His whole body was shaking. Tony cautiously held his hands up, hoping really hard that it wasn't another panic attack, that he wasn't going to end up flying across the room again.

“What are you talking about? You didn't wake me up,” he lied, hoping that it would help to calm the other down.

“No, not about... I... You shouldn't talk to me...” James said, his face in his hands from what Tony could see in the light of the arc reactor.

“Can you tell me what this is actually about?” Tony insisted after a beat. “What have you done that is so terrible?” _Did you forget to put the beer in the fridge?_

He had to fight the urge to joke, like he usually did when a situation made him uncomfortable. Seeing the state James was in, it would only make things worse. It was almost surprising, how much this need had come back in the last two days, while before that he had found his usual snark manifesting itself less and less. Even in his thoughts: in this place, shutting up was often a matter of survival, so the fact that he didn't mouth off his captors wasn't exactly surprising, but he normally had a constant internal monologue running in his head.

Well, now it was back, and at the least convenient time possible. _Ugh_.

He almost didn't catch the answer James muttered behind his metallic palm.

“I killed him.”

Tony frowned. He had seen the way HYDRA handled the Winter Soldier, had been a witness to some of his skill set, and could easily guess that in the time he had been in their hands, James had doubtlessly killed a little bit more than one person. So this one had to be special.

“Who are you talking about?” he asked as delicately as he could – which wasn't much.

“Howard,”James whispered.

Tony froze. _Howard_? There was more than one Howard in the world, he tried to reason with himself, despite what his father had sometimes seemed to think. He couldn't possibly be talking about Howard Stark. Howard had been killed in an accident.

 _Except that if there was one thing Dad was careful with, it had been his cars, so the failing of the brakes never made that much sense... And there_ was _an impressive amount of men in black suits running around for a while..._

“Are you talking about my father?” he still checked, dazed.

James' nod was the only confirmation he needed. He sat back on his haunches, his hand on the arc reactor, his throat suddenly too tight for him to breathe.

He couldn't say that his relationship with his father had been stellar, but still, hearing about his death, eighteen years later, and learning that it hadn't been an accident... Howard had been cold and distant, but he was his _father_. There was always a small, pathetic part of him who had waited for a sliver of the man's attention.

And Howard hadn't been alone in the car, of course. People always forgot about Maria, her soft voice and sweet perfumes. His _mother_.

His head felt like it was splitting in half. How he wished he had a bottle of whiskey...

He didn't know how long he stayed like that, motionless, staring at the wall above James' bent shape – trying to forget again the suffocating pain he had tried to chase with vodka for a while all those years ago – only that the soldier didn't straighten in that time. Eventually, though, he was brought back to himself by strange scratching sounds.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. This was neither the time nor the place for a mental break-down. He had to tell James that he didn't blame him, because if what he had seen in the few weeks he had been there was any indication, the poor man hadn't had any choice about anything since HYDRA had gotten their hands on him, but his current state showed that the soldier didn't agree with this interpretation...

“It wasn't your fault,” he finally croaked, praying that his voice wouldn't break.

“Like hell it wasn't!” James growled. “I was the one to sabotage the car!”

Tony frowned but didn't answer, wrinkling his nose. There was a faint metallic smell. Where did-

“What the fuck?!” he yelled. “What are you doing?! Stop!”

James flesh arm bore four parallel red lines that were starting to ooze blood. In the bluish light of the reactor, the tips of his metal fingers were stained black. The soldier was looking at them blankly.

“Okay, I'm really, really not qualified to handle this,” he babbled, panicked. Was James trying to punish himself? “But as the man who suffered the most from Howard's death, I think that I can tell you that it wasn't your fault.”

“ _You don't understand!_ I went to the car after it crashed, I even had to finish off the driver! I'm not a machine, I could have stopped at _any point of time_!”

Tony groaned. James wasn't going to listen, and while the genius understood how traumatic the memory was to him, they didn't have time for his misplaced guilt. Besides, he already had enough on his plate with his own grief and issues. How was he supposed to help anyone else when he was still such a fuck-up?

Inhaling deeply, he got up and crouched in front of James. Moving slowly, he took the other's hands in his and lowered them away from the soldier's red-rimmed eyes.

“Listen to me,” he started in his most convincing voice, the one he used on journalists asking about his ethics. “I've seen what they did to you. Look at you. Your hands have been shaking for two days. I don't know for how long they've had you, but there is one thing that I can tell you: you had no choice. They tortured you, probably drugged you, they even erased your memories. I don't blame you, and neither should you.”

James gazed down at him with watery eyes, sniffling lightly, but didn't try to free his hands. Tony was ready to call that a victory. He smiled encouragingly when the other raised his hands to put them on the genius' cheeks, and let himself be pulled up until their foreheads were touching. Tony closed his eyes, finally relaxing.

They sprang back open when their lips made contact.

 


	6. Having a blast

The first explosion happened exactly when Tony and James expected it.

The first of their guards died, his neck snapped by the soldier's metal hand. The two others were shot by the gun of the first one – two bullets in the chest and one in the forehead. The director didn't trust James enough to give him a weapon, but the soldier didn't need one to be deadly.

“The hangar is that way,” James said shortly.

The second explosion rang through the building, hopefully drawing more guards toward Tony's room, where a _surprise_ was waiting for them. The two fugitives started running as fast as the engineer's feet allowed them to.

Their path had been carefully chosen: they didn't meet anyone and managed to drop all the small bombs Tony had made where they needed them. Soon, they reached the armory, and the guard there, while on alert, was no a match for James's brutal efficiency.

It was pretty well stocked for an emergency base.

Tony grabbed a SI FRX60 – a handgun he had personally designed and knew was great at short range and easy to use – and a few clips of ammunition, and then, as an afterthought, two grenades. They might come in handy.

“You know how to use that?” James asked, his eyebrows raised. He was holding an AK-47 – classic but always efficient, clearly Russian-made – but Tony could see at least three guns at his belt, and while he could only see two knives, he strongly suspected that there were more hidden on the soldier.

The engineer sent back an unimpressed look. “I've been a weapon designer for twenty years, what do you think?” he drawled, smirking back at James' slightly taken aback look.

He didn't wait for an answer before running out, letting the other take point, aiming for the hangar where James had insisted vehicles were parked.

He had been right. Unfortunately, it meant that most of the remaining guards were posted there. James's arrival was sudden enough that he was able to down half of them before they could react, but he and Tony were forced to take cover behind a jeep after that.

Tony kept his head down, scanning the part of the room that he could see. He could fire a gun pretty accurately, but knew both from Rhodey and from his own recent experience that no amount of training in a range could really prepare for a firefight. James, at his side, was much more active, and every single time he stuck his head above the hood of the truck, a pained cry from their enemies confirmed that he had hit his target.

He focused back on his surroundings. The room was big, of course, but not huge, and only contained five cars and – oh glorious sight – a helicopter. The roof could be opened, too... He located the control panel against the wall fifty feet away.

“Hey!” he shouted to get James's attention. “Can you distract them while I go there?”

The soldier followed his gestures and frowned.

“What are you trying to do?” he yelled back. “Can you even fly the chopper?”

Tony grinned madly. “Of course!”

Looking definitely not reassured, James pulled a face.

“Maybe, if you're really fast, but there are still at least five of them... No, they'll shoot at you,” he said assessed. “Don't-”

Tony didn't wait for the order and bolted, ignoring the soldier swearing behind him. Fortunately, the controls were mere levers clearly labeled: it only took him a few seconds to find and pull the one he had been looking for.

The mechanisms, though very noisy, were in perfect working order, but it meant that now everyone's attention was on him. He started running back to the jeep and froze like a deer in headlights when he noticed the three guns that were pointed at him.

Then the soldier jumped out of his hiding place and the goons, too busy trying to put the assassin down, forgot about Tony. The fight didn't last long after that: with direct visual, James didn't need more than ten seconds to kill all the remaining guards.

After the last gunshot, the silence was deafening. James turned to face Tony, and the engineer had to take a step back when he saw the look of pure rage on the other's face.

“I told you to _stay hidden_!” the soldier growled dangerously.

Tony was stopped from answering – and that was probably for the better, the soldier might have killed him if he had – by the sound of boots coming from the hallway.

“We need to get moving!” he barked instead.

They ran to the chopper and jumped in, and the engineer set to work to get it started.

“What... Can you even hotwire this thing?” James asked, his anger apparently replaced by bewilderment.

“O' coursh I ca',” Tony answered through the screwdriver he was holding with his teeth.

Half a minute later, and at the same time that half a dozen HYDRA henchmen irrupted into the hangar, the aircraft took off. Tony felt confident: he had been a pretty good pilot when his father had made him learn, and while some of the commands were unfamiliar, he had no trouble keeping the chopper stable.

They both smirked when they heard the base explode behind them. Between the charges they had left in Tony's room, the ones in the room where he had been working, and the ones they had left during their escape, the whole place would be blown to bits.

“Where are we going?” Tony asked, watching the navigation system. According to them, this base had been in the middle of Vietnamese mountains.

“Madripoor,” James answered shortly. “Head south. It's not too far away and it will be easy to stay hidden there.”

Tony frowned. He had been to Madripoor, but he doubted that James was aiming for the palace and the luxury hotels, and while he had never been in Lowtown, he had heard... _stories_.

“I don't want to stay hidden,” he pouted. “I want to go back to the States. We need to find a military base, they'll call my people.”

He winced when James's hand fell on his wrist too heavily.

“We can't, they'll arrest me on sight and HYDRA will find me,” the soldier said, his voice strangely high-pitched. His breathing was fast, his eyes wide: he looked on the verge of a panic attack.

Tony glanced at him and tried to smile soothingly.

“Okay, okay,” he relented. “We can find somewhere too hide. I'll go back by myself-” He winced when the grip on his arm tightened again. “-or maybe not, we'll talk about it later...”

James' grip relaxed, and that's when Tony noticed how wet the other's black tactical jacket looked around his right shoulder. His mind flashed back to young soldiers fallen in the sand.

“What... Did you get shot?!” he panicked.

James started unbuckling the jacket, seemingly unfazed.

“That's nothing,” he shrugged, “it's through and through. I don't need to dig the bullet out. It won't slow me.”

While talking, he took it off completely, and Tony was treated to an impressive expense of pale, smooth skin. Apart from the injury on his right shoulder and the raised scars around the edge of the metal arm, James had no scar on his chest. And no hair. And _lots_ of muscle. _No, nope, not the time..._

He silently cursed his libido for choosing this time to wake up, and concentrated on the wound.

“It looks bad,” he insisted. “You need to see a doctor, it need at least a few stitches or it'll take forever to heal.”

There was a pause, and he didn't realize that something had gone wrong until James lowered his eyes and started droning, “First degree burn, two hours. Second degree burn, twelve hours. Third degree burn, thirty six hours. Gunshot wound, small calibers, six hours. Abdominal gunshot wound-”

“Stop!” Tony interrupted, horrified. James blinked and briefly shook his head.

“What happened?” he asked confusedly.

For a minute, Tony was unable to answer, his throat too tight. Where had that come from? Why did the Winter Soldier know that? Was it some kind of... user manual for his handlers? And _how_ could he know all those facts so precisely?

Actually, he probably didn't want the answer of that last question.

“You zoned out,” he lied when he was once again able to talk.

He could see that James didn't believe him but didn't care. No way he was describing that to anyone, even to him. His face probably displayed his mindset, because James didn't push him, and instead started staring moodily through the windshield.

Tony tried concentrating on flying, but it was far too easy to keep his mind busy. He couldn't stop himself from squirming in his seat.

“Are we going to talk about the other night?” he eventually sighed, his eyes fixed on the landscape in front of them.

From the corner of his eyes, he could see James tense up.

“Do we have to?” the soldier asked desperately.

“Well, we could bury it deep in denial and never mention it again,” Tony shrugged, “or you could explain to me what you meant by that and we could go on from there. I mean, I barely had the time to understand that you were kissing me before you jumped back, so you can't blame me for not participating. So, did you or did you not want to do this?”

James turned toward him, looking bewildered and angry.

“I'm not a fairy!” he growled dangerously.

Tony raised his eyebrows. _That_ was the problem? Well, he had always been more interested by a challenge...

“If you say so,” he smirked, assuming that 'fairy' was a weird (old?) word for gay. “That's too bad...”

He had actually felt mildly offended when James, after kissing him for less than two seconds, had leapt to the other side of the room and started shaking. After that, he had refused to so much as look at Tony for the rest of the night, and the engineer still didn't know if it had been from embarrassment or if he had actually been having flashbacks. And of course, the following morning, he had acted as if nothing had happened... Tony was good at avoidance tactics – Pepper would confirm it – but the soldier's stony silence had worn thin his determination to get answers faster than any of those could have. After all, in the last few days, they'd had more urgent things to think about.

But now that they had escaped, they didn't really have more pressing concerns, and while Tony hadn't really thought about James that way before the kiss – or anyone since his capture, really – he had to admit that the idea held a certain appeal. James was good-looking, which was usually enough for the genius, and since he had started acting more like a human, Tony couldn't ignore that he _liked_ the guy. The number of people he genuinely felt affection for was terribly low, but now James was among them.

So really, his only complaint about the kiss was that it had been so short.

Unfortunately, he had no idea what James had been thinking about at the time. Had it been a way of seeking comfort? Or had it been backed by more... romantic feelings? The vehemence of James' reaction should have hinted toward the latter, yet... Tony doubted his ability to inspire that kind of sentiment, especially in his current state: he hadn't shaved for a month, hadn't taken a shower in almost two weeks and knew how sickly the infection made him look. Right then, he was as far as he could be from the suave playboy who had landed in Afghanistan four months ago. There was no way he could attract anyone. Least of all James, who had seen him at his very lowest, when he had been crying and begging for anything to make the pain stop.

But he knew about comfort sex and would definitely not mind helping James out that way. It was a step up from the mindless one-night-stands that had occupied his nights for years: at least he _liked_ James; it was an awfully low bar, but it did put James a step above most people he had slept with in his life. Of course, it was only a possibility if James' homophobia, and the distaste Tony's state couldn't fail to produce, didn't outweigh his need for physical intimacy.

His train of thought had effectively put a damper on his good mood, turning his smirk bitter. Or maybe it was just the adrenalin of their escape running out and all his hurts reminding him of their presence...

He wasn't looking at the other man anymore and nearly jumped out of his skin when James' hand appeared back on his forearm. He was half-expecting his grip to be bruising again, but this time it was light and almost tentative. Surprised, Tony turned his head and met James' gaze. The soldier looked surprisingly hopeful, if far from confident. It was strange, seeing him like that: it was the most vulnerable Tony had ever seen him. His usual blankness was nowhere to be seen.

“Do you mean that?” James asked, his eyes fixed on Tony's face as if he was looking for something.

“Of course,” Tony shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Why wouldn't I?”

Apparently, he had passed a test, because James' shoulders relaxed slightly.

“Well, some people don't like it when fellas take that kind of initiative,” the soldier answered with a hint of sadness. Was he speaking from experience?

“You're good-looking and I like you,” Tony said with a lopsided smile, “I would be disappointed if you didn't want to go further. Besides, you're a great kisser.”

“Yeah? I hadn't practiced for a while,” James replied, finally cracking a smile. “So... You really don't mind?”

“I really don't,” he stated. “Actually, if I wasn't flying the chopper we are in, I would show you how much I don't mind in excruciating details,” he added with a leer towards the other.

He was happy to see James' smug smirk, and the silence that followed was comfortable.

A few minutes later, Tony felt pleasantly surprised when, glancing at James, he saw that the other had fallen asleep, his hand still resting on the engineer's arm.

 


	7. Welcome to Madripoor

Tony looked around the room in distaste. The place was _filthy_. He hadn't really been expecting anything better, but the stained walls and the carpet reeking of vomit were... off-putting, to say the least.

On the upside, the flat did lack armed guards and neo-nazis, so it was a step up from their previous location. But it _stank._ Wrinkling his nose, the engineer followed James inside.

The soldier had assured him that the place was perfectly secure: the door – unlike the furniture or the plumbing – was solid enough to stop small caliber bullets, and the other residents of the building would definitely look the other way as long as they weren't directly disturbed.

Those weren't criteria Tony usually took into account when considering a place to live in.

On the other hand, he usually only had to worry about paparazzi and the occasional over-enthusiastic fan, not abduction by shady organization supposed to have disappeared since World War II. _God_ , his _life_. And he wasn't even the worst off in the room...

They were _so fucked_.

The room was only marginally bigger than his cell had been, and contained a bed in a corner that was little more than a mattress on a plank, a low table missing half a leg, and a small kitchen with a leaking sink. The bathroom looked as decrepit as everything else, the door hanging on its last hinge, the tiles cracked in places.

“Well, what a nice little love nest,” Tony sighed, flopping down on the bed.

“It's strategically sound,” the soldier answered shortly.

Tony raised his hands in surrender.

“Not complaining,” he placated, “it's still better than a cell. Anyway, it's not like we'll stay here for long...”

“What do you mean?” James asked flatly.

Tony shrugged, ignoring the other's hostile reaction, and explained, “I won't force you to come with me, even if I would prefer if you did, but now that we're out, I need to go back home. I have friends who probably think that I am dead by now, and I have a lot of things to settle. There are weapons with my name on them in the hands of terrorists. Besides, staying hidden is nice, but we'll live in constant fear of being found, while in the States we could actually protect ourselves.”

“No, we couldn't!” James snapped, surprisingly fierce. “What better kind of protection could we get than disappearing? You don't know how powerful HYDRA really is, while if we stay hidden, as long as we are careful, they will never find us...”

“Well, the military kinda like me, you know, what with the whole building weapons thing, and they have a little but more to work with than you do,” he answered with a frown. “No offense.”

James' face was unreadable, expressions flashing too fast on it. He stared at Tony for a few beats, almost looming above him, and then his features relaxed, becoming eerily close to the Winter Soldier's usual blank expression.

Tony didn't see the metal hand coming, and the blow was violent enough for him to black out instantly.

  


* * *

 

 

When he came to, he was at first blinded by a bright light flung right into his left eye. He flailed a little and was relieved to feel strong hands closing around his own, more reassuring than restraining.

The light left his line of sight and was replaced by a worried face.

“Can you hear me?” the man asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony answered thickly. His head was pounding. What the hell had happened to him _again_? He couldn't remember a fucking thing past arriving to the room James had found for them in Lowtown.

He blinked twice. The man in front of him was definitely _not_ James. He was smaller, for once, or at least he looked smaller, holding himself hunched, as if he was trying to look as non-threatening as possible. And he had the shifty demeanor Tony had come to associate to cowards and fugitives, without being able to tell in which category the man fell.

All in all, he didn't look like someone who would last long in Lowtown Madripoor. And he was certainly not a native: his features, while tanned by the sun, were clearly Caucasian.

Probably sensing his growing mistrust, the man raised his hands placatingly.

“I'm a doctor,” he said, “your friend brought me here for your head wound. What do you remember?”

Tony realized that they were indeed still in the same crappy room, and that he was lying on the mattress, the doctor kneeling at his side. James was nowhere to be seen, though.

“Where is he?” he asked instead of answering. Speaking was hard: his thoughts were muddled, the words didn't come as fluidly as they should have, and his tongue felt like lead in his mouth.

“I sent him away, he was hovering”, the other replied, unfazed. “Please answer my question, I need to know whether you have brain damage. From the look of your injury, you are lucky that your skull wasn't cracked open...”

It certainly felt like it had. He blinked. “I remember arriving here. What happened?”

The doctor shrugged. “Your friend didn't tell me. Can you tell me your name and the date?”

“I know my own name, thank you,” Tony snapped, already annoyed and suspicious – god his head was _hurting –_ “and I'm not stupid enough to tell you. I have no idea what the date is... but that's normal. Probably around September or October 2009, I think?”

“Fair enough,” the doctor sighed. “My name is Robert, if it makes you feel any better, and the day is September 23th.”

“I'm Edward,” the engineer answered after a beat. He didn't feel even remotely bad for lying: both his and James' security depended on his ability not to be recognized.

“Well, Edward, I'm going to make a few tests, to see how serious your concussion is. Is that okay with you?” Robert asked.

Tony nodded, wincing at his headache that seemed to get worse with his every little move. Fortunately, his thoughts at least already felt clearer than when he had woken up. He let the doctor palpate his skull, hissing when his fingers came too close to his left temple, and subjected himself to the few exercises Robert asked from him without uttering a word.

He was surprised by how easy staying silent was: if Pepper had seen him at the moment, she would have thought that he actually had brain damage... Yet, for the last few weeks – probably since he had spent two weeks in isolation, now that he was thinking about it – his usual need to talk had been oddly reduced. His behavior in general had been strangely subdued, actually, and he couldn't find a reason that would explain it – at least when he had been alone or with James, who had never been fazed by his running mouth, anyway. He knew _why_ he was shutting up in front of the trigger-happy HYDRA guards.

He was brutally brought back to reality, and to the man in front of him, when Robert started sliding his hand under Tony's top.

“Nope!” he blurted, throwing himself backwards and batting the other's hands away. He didn't go very far, but the doctor stopped moving

“What is it?” he frowned. “Are you hurt? I can take a look at it, you know, it'd probably be better...” he added with a meaningful look at their surroundings.

Tony tried to school his features back to neutrality, but he could see from Robert's worried expression that he hadn't been completely successful. It wasn't surprising: the miniaturized arc reactor was probably the most distinctive piece of technology in the whole world, as well as being necessary to his continued survival, so the prospect of letting anyone so much as look at it was enough to make him panic a little.

Of course, now that Robert's attention had been caught, the odds of keeping it from him were pretty low. Defensively, he folded his legs in front of him, hiding his torso.

“I'm fine,” he choked out through the waves of cold fear, trying to telegraph with his body language how done he was with this conversation. Maybe his non-verbal communication skills weren't completely botched after all, because the doctor sighed and let go of his stethoscope.

“I'm not going to force you to show me, but if it is an open wound, you need to clean it with something sterile, and there is absolutely nothing sterile in this place,” he explained softly.

“It's not,” the engineer answered, slightly calmer. He wouldn't admit it out loud, but the reassurance was actually helping, what with how used he was now to people around him ignoring his opinion.

The thought hit him so suddenly that it left him reeling.

_I am free._

He was free, and nobody had the power to control or punish him anymore.

Emboldened by this feeling, he straightened and, keeping a hand over his chest, started raising the back of his shirt.

“You can see my back if you want,” he allowed, “but I don't show my chest on the first date.”

The doctor huffed out a laugh. “If you're feeling well enough to joke about it,” he snorted, “it can't be too bad. Bend over as far as you can, please.”

“So forward, doctor,” Tony snickered while he complied. “Buy me dinner first...”

Robert stayed silent for a few minutes while he listened to Tony's heartbeat and respiration, then patted him lightly on the shoulder to let him know that he was done. “Your vitals are all fine,” he said with a small smile, “and you seem psychologically alright; I can't tell you more without a full-on scan. You probably have a killer headache, though, so I'll give you some painkillers to take off the edge. Your friend asked me to take a look at your feet too, so maybe you could take off your boots?”

Internally groaning, Tony obeyed. He had forgotten about his feet. During their escape, after they had left the chopper and before they had stolen their first car, somewhere in the south of Vietnam, James had managed to find him a pair of boots two sizes too large – anything smaller and he couldn't fit the layers of bandage wrapped around his toes. Still, even in those, he couldn't avoid the pain every step brought, and since he still had no socks, he knew that his feet were covered in blisters.

Slowly unwrapping the dressing, he winced at the reddened flesh he was uncovering. His toenails had probably started to grow back, but the process was slow and he couldn't see them at all.

Robert hissed in sympathy at the sight and closed his eyes for a few seconds, fists clenched. Tony frowned. The doctor's reaction was surprisingly intense; on the other hand, Tony figured that his injuries were pretty distinctive, and that most people had that kind of reaction to torture. Or so he hoped.

But had he really seen a glimpse of green in Robert's eyes? Or were hallucinations among concussion symptoms?

 

* * *

 

James came back around half an hour later. His worried frown vanished when his eyes met Tony's, and was replaced by sheepishness. Wordlessly, he handed a small plastic bag to Robert and crouched at Tony's side.

“Are you alright?” he asked, biting his lower lip.

“I'll be,” Tony answered with a small shrug. “The doctor said that I have no brain damage. What happened?”

James looked away instead of answering. He was _fidgeting_. Him, who had spent _hours_ watching Tony without moving an inch, was worrying at the hem of his ratty hoodie. Tony squinted warily. Why was he acting that way?

“There was an incident, my hand jerked, you were too close, I'm so sorry...” the soldier answered almost too fast and too low for Tony to understand.

The engineer had to take a few seconds to process the words, but when he had, he paled.

While he hadn't really had an occasion to sit down and study James' arm, he had seen it in action for long enough to know that the arm didn't _jerk_. If James had hit him with it, it couldn't be because of a mechanical issue. The only possibility was that his companion had been unable to control himself, either because of a panic attack – but then, he would have said something about it, it wasn't like it would have been the first time – or because he had gone back to the mindset of HYDRA's soldier.

And in this bare room, the only thing that could have triggered this change was Tony himself.

Well, he had known that he would fuck up at some point, but he hadn't thought that it would happen so fast.

He didn't realize that he had started to shake until Robert touched his shoulder softly, startling him. He put on a false smile and tried waving away.

“I'm alright, doc, you can leave now,” he said, his voice steady despite his churning guilt. Not for the first time, he was thankful that his habit to avoid talking about his health or his drunkenness with Obie and Pepper had made him so good at lying about himself.

The doctor didn't seem to have noticed, anyway. While he was putting his tools away, he gave Tony a few pills that he should take if the pain got too bad and promised to come back a few days later to check on him. Tony waited until he was alone with James to sag.

Instantly, James crouched in front of him and took Tony's hands in his own.

“I'm so, so sorry,” he started instantly, his eyes wide and his brow furrowed. “I lost control for a minute, and when I got it back, you were on the ground and bleeding and I thought-”

“Wow, slow down, Robocop!” the engineer yelped, taken aback, when it became obvious that the soldier was on the verge of a panic attack. “I'm pretty sure that I was the one who triggered you. What did I do before you blacked out?”

James faltered and his expression turned thoughtful.

“You're probably right, it must have been something you said... It's probably... Oh, I know. You were talking about going back to America.” He paused, and added, “You know that this isn't on you, right? I should be able not to hit you even when you annoy me.”

Tony shrugged evasively. He didn't remember what he had done, but he knew himself: he had probably noticed James' unease and kept pushing anyway. And he was fine, really, apart from the headache that Robert's pill were already taking care of. He just needed to be more careful, and everything would be alright.

Unfortunately, it meant that he couldn't bring up again the subject of returning to the States, and that sucked. They couldn't stay in Madripoor indefinitely, after all: even if they were careful, as long as HYDRA was out to get them, they would never be really safe. And Tony wasn't exactly willing to stay in this dump longer than what was strictly necessary... Beside, he had seen with the Ten Rings that somehow, some of his weapons had found their way to the hands of terrorists, and it didn't sit well with him at all. He had _work_ to do, work that he couldn't do from there.

But if talking about it caused James to look so stricken by guilt (and that kind of headache, to, because _ow_ ), then he was willing to wait a bit.

However, apparently, James was thinking about the same thing.

“I'm still sorry about your head,” he started uneasily, “but I still think that you shouldn't leave. I... They wiped me pretty often, you know, so I don't remember much before we got to that last base, but it's coming back, so... I remember finding you in a desert?”

Surprised by the change of topic, Tony nodded. “Yeah, that happened,” he acquiesced. “Why?”

“I was briefed before this mission, and I overheard my handlers,” James explained. “They knew that you were in this area because someone had told them. I don't know who they were talking about, but they said that someone had paid to have you killed, and that since it hadn't worked, they were counting on HYDRA to make you disappear.”

Tony had to take a few moments to fully understand what it meant.

Someone had paid the Ten Rings to kill him.

In a way, it wasn't much of a surprise. Although he had tried not to think too much about it, the attack on the convoy had been too well organized to be a fluke: they had known exactly where to strike. Hell, even in the convoy itself, they had probably known in which car he would be.

But who had paid them? James didn't seem to know, but the list of suspects was rather small. Very few people had known the exact location of the presentation of the Jericho. There were Obie and Pepper, of course, Rhodey, a few American generals and a few Afghan dignitaries.

He knew very well that the American army had every reasons to keep him alive and productive for as long as they could, since he had designed pretty much all of their best weapons, and that the culprit couldn't be Obie, Pepper or Rhodey.

The Afghan government was... definitely more complicated, but the people involved in the demonstration were supposed to be on their side. Still, one bad apple would have been enough. Yep, he'd have to ask Obie to launch an investigation.

“Okay, that kinda change things, I'll give you that, but it was Afghanistan. I'll be safe, back in America. You can't imagine how many people are protecting me,” he shrugged.

James' answering smile was bitter.

“Actually, I can. You know who else was protected as well as you are?” he asked.

Tony eyed him warily. “Okay, I'll bite. Who?” he answered, already knowing that he wasn't going to like what was coming.

“Your father.”

… Well, he wasn't wrong. During the Cold War, Howard had been marked as a potential target by several agencies. In the end, apparently, it hadn't stopped the Winter Soldier...

But even as he conceded the argument, he still couldn't imagine spending his life on the run. He wasn't built for it: he was far too recognizable, wasn't used to adapting instead of forcing his surroundings to adapt to him, and had learned how to stand out in a crowd, not how to fade in it.

Nevertheless, James apparently thought that the conversation was finished. He got up and walked to the door.

“I'll be back in two hours, maybe three, okay? I have to find some things. Stay safe.”

And, just like that, he was gone.

Overtaken by an ominous feeling, Tony rose to his feet, limped to the door and tried the handle.

It was locked.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://nonolemog.tumblr.com/)!


	8. Under-the-table dealings

“Why the hell did you lock the door? What am I, your prisoner?” Tony growled as soon as James came back.

The soldier stopped dead in his tracks, his startled gaze zeroing in on the engineer.

“What are you talking about?” he asked back, his bewilderment obvious, “Of course I locked the door! Do you have any idea what kind of people live around this place? I wasn't going to leave you alone without any protection! Are you seriously telling me off for trying to keep you safe?”

Put like that, it made sense... And now Tony felt like a jerk. All his anger subsided, leaving only shame and exhaustion in its place. He had been so quick to jump to the wrong conclusion, while it had actually only been a matter of basic caution, and an obvious one at that! He had heard the stories about Lowtown and seen what their neighbors looked like – that is, not like people who would be receptive to his particular brand of humor.

“Why do you care, anyway?” James added, when Tony didn't answer. “It's not as if you were going to go out without me...”

“It's just the principle of the thing,” Tony answered, feeling very, very tired. Robert's painkillers had worn off an hour ago, and his headache was terrible. “I want to be done with being locked up now...”

“Are you comparing me to HYDRA?” James asked, his face dangerously blank. Yep, bad subject. Not only did Tony know how wrong the comparison was – how different being stuck in their room, filthy as it was, was from being tortured and forced to work with Nazis – but he also knew that angering James was _not_ a good idea. It hadn't really worked out last time.

“Sorry, I'm a little high-strung right now,” he sighed, sitting down on the mattress. “My head is still killing me...”

“Robert should come back in a few days,” James assured him, his anger replaced by worry in a matter of seconds. “Will you be okay until then? Otherwise, I can find some drugs for you. Or another doctor.”

But Tony knew – partly from experience, because he had made a few interesting mistakes in his youth – that there was a reason why you shouldn't take the next dose of painkillers too soon after the previous one, and he  _really_ didn't want to freak James out by drugging himself into a stupor. Besides, he was starting to get used to being in a near constant state of pain: between his chest, his feet, which still didn't fell any closer to healing, and now his head, the novelty of it had  definitely worn off.

Anyway, what he really craved for was a drink, something strong enough to let him forget his situation for a few minutes. No, not even that. After more than four months of a living hell, what he wanted more than anything was to go home, not be stuck indefinitely in this shithole...

But James didn't see it that way, and for now, he was the one in charge, if only because he was the best qualified to handle hiding from HYDRA. Or, you know, living without a personal assistant. And also – if Tony was perfectly honest, which he rarely was – because the guy wasn't exactly stable and needed all the control over his own situation that he could get. They didn't need a repeat of the earlier incident... Besides, even if the other hadn't said much about his own experience, Tony had witnessed enough to guess that he had been a prisoner for far longer than the engineer had, and in much worse conditions: he deserved to be able to make his own decisions for a bit, even if they sometimes clashed with Tony's idea of comfort.

Shaking his head in answer to James' question, he tried to find a way to change the subject. Maybe he could bring up the soldier's past? Surely some of it at least wasn't triggering... He was pretty sure that James was American, perhaps even from New York, and that at some point he had known Tony's father well enough to call him Howard, but that was it: no idea about how he had lost his arm, how HYDRA had gotten their hands on him (though both questions might actually be linked), or even how old he really was.

Actually, that last question was a nice opening for this conversation. It wasn't overly personal, and shouldn't be associated with too many painful memories.

“When were you born?” he asked out of the blue, visibly startling the soldier.

“In 1917,” the soldier answered, sitting down beside Tony. “Why are you asking?”

Tony shrugged. “I was wondering, since I knew that you don't really look your age... I didn't expect you to be ninety, though, to be honest,” he admitted. “Are you from New York?”

“That obvious, uh?” James laughed. “Brooklyn, actually. I lived there for over twenty years before shipping out. Got drafted. Didn't expect it to last so long...”

In  the forties, then... He probably went to the European theater, if he had met Howard. Dear old dad had spent a lot of time  in London before moving more permanently to Los Alamos, when he was still working with Captain America, and- yeah, bad train of thought, better talk about something else. He was far too sober to think about the  freaking star spangled man with a plan.

“What about that guy you talked about, Stevie?” he asked, looking desperately for a change of subject, and ignoring the fact that “talked about” was a gross overstatement. “Was he a fellow soldier?”

James' answering smile was sweet but short-lived.

“He was my friend,” he started after a beat, as if unsure about how to describe it. “We met when we were kids. He was a good person, always trying to do what's right... Always trying to get himself killed. He tried to join the army, you know... Couldn't of course, but he didn't let that stop him.”

“Really?” Tony asked. “I thought that the army wasn't too picky at the time... Why couldn't he?”

“He was a moron,” James sighed.

“That never stopped the army,” Tony quipped automatically.

James snorted. “ Yeah, that wasn't the problem, but  he  also had every illness under the sun. Asthma, diabetes, scoliosis.... You didn't need to be a doctor to know that he wouldn't last five minutes in a real battle. But he  _had_ to go to Europe. Couldn't do his part from New York, of course, because he always had to prove that he was brave enough  or tough enough, the little punk... I mean, I get it, there were plenty of people who thought that he was a weakling and a waste of space back then, but it was frustrating. I caught him lying on his enlistment form so that he could try again after they turned him down. As if they'd take him if he tried enough times.”

He stopped, looking mildly bewildered, and added, “uh, I hadn't realized how much had come back...”

It made sense: if his memories had been erased by severing cerebral connections, then he could have healed gradually without suffering flashbacks, and only realize how far it had gone when trying to summon memories.

If it was the case, it meant that asking about his past was actually helping him while satisfying Tony's curiosity. Perfect!

With that in mind, the engineer decided to keep fishing for details.

“What happened to him?” he asked, even though he knew that the odds of a happy ending were low; hell, if Steve had still been alive when James had left New York, chances were that the soldier's didn't even know what had happened to his friend...

But apparently, it wasn't the case. “He found the biggest bully that he could punch and got himself killed,” James said. “God, I miss him...” He paused, and Tony politely ignored the way his voice had wavered.

“That's how he called them: bullies,” he added after a few seconds of silence. “The Nazis were bullies. The Japs, too. Same as the bigger boys who picked on him at school, or the guys catcalling girls in the street, or the police when they raided the bars downtown to beat up the drag queens...”

“Were the two of you... together?” Tony asked, surprised. After James reaction to their first kiss, he hadn't expected the guy to talk about that kind of things. Hell, even without that, the guy was _old_ ; it wouldn't have been surprising if his morals were a little... outdated.

“No, we were friends,” James smiled wistfully. “I don't think that he liked men. He knew that I did, though, and it didn't bother him, but I had to be careful or people would have assumed things... We lived together for a while, and he already got into so much trouble just by running his mouth, I didn't want to add to it. He was small and went to art school, the last thing he needed was another rumor... So I got used to lying about that. We had the whole thing figured out: I would go out with girls – I liked them, it wasn't exactly a hardship – try to find one who could bring a friend for Steve, he wouldn't talk to her for the whole date because he thought that they were just pitying him, so of course they never got to see how great he actually was, and sometimes we would end the night in one of those bars. The people were always nicer with him there, and I could flirt a bit with them, it was fun. Steve was an artist, the guys liked it when he drew them. He was real good...”

Tony really hadn't expected the soldier's memories to take them to the gay scene of pre-war Brooklyn, but he was fascinated by the boy James had been. Even though he didn't look older than thirty, the soldier's eyes were old; it was pretty obvious that he had seen a lot, and it made picturing him as a happy young man difficult. Yet, when he described his friend, his grin had lit up his whole face – which reminded Tony of how handsome James was, because the world was unfair like that. Of course his sex-drive had to reappear at the most inappropriate time. _Hey, I know that we were talking about your dead best friend, but do you wanna make out?_ Completely appropriate, of course.

“So he got beat up often, then?” Tony said, trying to steer the conversation away from James' love life.

“All the fucking time,” the soldier sighed, but his eyes were fond. “Sometimes I think that he went out for the sole purpose of looking for a fight: nobody could be such a trouble magnet without trying. The night before I shipped out, I found him in an alley, trying to punch a guy twice his size... And when I made the other guy run away, you know what this punk told me? “I had him on the ropes”! Like hell he did... I swear he was trying to give me gray hairs before I hit thirty.”

“Must have been exhausting,” Tony commiserated, trying not to think about Rhodey, who probably thought that he was dead by now.

“It was,” James confirmed. “But he was worth it. He was a great man...and my best friend.”

And with that, it was as if a door had been closed. No subtle prodding could get more out of him. Instead, to break the silence, Tony talked about his own friends, and tried not to think about the fact that he still could not communicate with them.

* * *

“Is your arm still working well? It's making weird noises...” Tony said the following morning. “It's not hurting you, is it?”

James looked down self-consciously at the metallic limb.

“It won't affect my performances,” he answered with a shrug that was probably supposed to look casual.

“That's definitely not a no,” Tony frowned. “I could do something about it, you know. I could even replace it, if I was in my workshop. Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty great piece of technology and it's going to revolutionize prosthetics as soon as I manage to make it cost effective, but it's got so many design flaws-”

“We can't get the necessary supplies here,” James interrupted, “it'll be too obvious, and HYDRA is still looking for us.”

While the reason given seemed perfectly rational, Tony felt disproportionately angry at the rebuttal. The truth was that he was deadly bored, and getting antsy: his skin was crawling with the urge to _do_ _something_. James had spent hours outside the day before, coming back with food, clothes and information from new contacts, but Tony hadn't seen anything other than the walls of their room since they had arrived, and the initial excitement at being free from HYDRA had long since worn off.

The room was starting to look a lot like another cell.

Swallowing down his temper, he suggested hopefully, “I can still take a look. I've already seen the inside, I know that some things can be set right without any specialized tools...”

James paused, then sat down and reluctantly took off his shirt. On the outside, the arm was slightly dented, but the outer plating could still be lifted to access the inside.

It didn't take more than a second to see that nothing could be done right now, and that something needed to be done very soon. Some wires were starting to rust, and they were pretty important ones, too. Actually, the one that seemed on the verge of falling off was directly plugged into James' nerves, if he had read the diagrams right, and it would hurt like hell if it disconnected.

But changing the wiring in this environment, with only basic tools and no real replacement (because he strongly doubted that James would bring him industrial quality copper, let alone anything better), was the equivalent of trying to take out the shrapnel in his chest with a rusted fork. This was different from building the armor in the cave: at least then he had had access to some actual materials, and the armor hadn't been directly connected to someone else's brain...

“I need my workshop to do some maintenance on this, or you're going to be paralyzed by pain very soon,” he announced bluntly. “Actually, scratch that, I need my workshop to make you an arm that isn't meant to keep you dependent on a mechanic. Seriously, this thing is going to kill you if you don't take care of it. I'm pretty sure that some of the components will get into your blood if you just wait long enough... I know that you're more resistant than an average human, but even you will _not_ like heavy-metal poisoning.”

James frowned. “I already told you that I don't _want_ to go back to the states. Why do you keep insisting? I won't change my mind, you know.”

Tony glared back. “Are you even listening to me? I'm not saying that because I want to go home, I'm saying that because you're going to _die_ if we don't! “

“You underestimate my healing factor,” James shrugged. “I'll be fine, don't worry about me.”

Tony felt so frustrated he was ready to scream. Was James actually deaf? Or did he just think that Tony was an idiot? Or maybe he just didn't trust him, which hurt more than expected. Tony wouldn't try to manipulate his friend this way, but apparently said friend had decided that he wasn't worth listening to.

He tried to feel anything else than tired resignation when James roughly put back the missing plates on his arm and got up. If only he could manage to at least get angry, or betrayed... But the only word he could find that accurately described how he felt was _numb._ The joy at being free at last? Gone. His usual longing for home? Gone. The hurt at being ignored by James? Nowhere to be found. It would have been really scary if he had still been able to feel fear.

So when James left the flat without another glance at him, he did the only thing he still had the energy for.

He laid down on the bare mattress and stared at the ceiling until he couldn't keep his eyes open.

* * *

When Robert walked through the door, he flinched at the sight of Tony. Not surprising, since he probably made for a very pitiful sight. In the week (maybe? His sense of time had been shot to hell) since their last encounter, he had slept very little, despite spending hours lying on the mattress, and eaten even less. Though James brought him food regularly, he just kinda... forgot to eat it. He didn't really see the point, when everything tasted like cardboard, and it took so much of his energy... Between that and the months spent away from the sun, his pallor alone probably made him look half-dead.

T his time, James stayed in the room with them, hovering awkwardly around them while the doctor checked on his toes.

“Tell me, doc, will I be pretty again?” he asked jokingly,though it probably sounded as exhausted and empty as he felt.

“It's not healing as well as I hoped,” Robert frowned in answer. “Are you eating enough?”

“I'm not hungry,” Tony shrugged. It wasn't technically a lie, and he didn't want to talk about his apathy with a stranger.

The piercing gaze directed at him told him very clearly how transparent his half-truth was.

Then Robert narrowed his eyes and glanced at James. “ Can you find us some clear water, please?” he asked cheerfully.

Even though it seemed obvious to Tony that the request wasn't genuine, James apparently didn't notice, and left with a nod.

“I know it's not easy to talk about these kind of things with a stranger,” Robert started as soon as the door had closed, “but do you want me to get you out of here? I can make sure that your... friend never finds us.”

“What do you mean?” Tony frowned. “Why would I want to leave?”

“You realize that it's not healthy, right?” the doctor answered, tilting his head.

“What the hell are you talking about? You're not making any sense, doc,” Tony insisted, annoyed.

“Your relationship with that man. He's the one who hit you, right? And you're tensing every time he comes closer to you...”

I t took a few seconds before what Robert meant registered, and then for a moment Tony didn't know if he was going to laugh or to cry.  In the end he did neither, but smiled humorlessly.

“I can see why you'd think that, but you don't understand. He's not that bad, just... not very stable. I startled him, the other day. I'm trying to be careful, I'm just not very good at keeping my mouth shut...”

Robert didn't seem convinced. “If you say so,” he relented, “I guess that you probably know more about your own situation than I do. Can you at least take this? And if you change your mind, tell me. Believe me, I can help you if you ever need it.”

Tony nodded and extended his hand, though he doubted that any doctor could do anything for him if he decided that he needed to run away from James _and_ HYDRA at the same time. _Signs that you are in an abusive relationship,_ the offered flyer read. How charming, he thought dryly.

Nonetheless, there was something about Robert's concern that felt comforting. The doctor had seen a situation that he thought was abnormal, and had immediately taken steps to make it better; maybe it was only basic human decency, but that had been incredibly lacking in Tony's life recently.

“Thank you,” he said, and it should just have been an automatic answer to being given something, but it ended up sounding sincerely grateful. Robert probably caught that, since his answering smile was wider than anything Tony had ever seen on him, if still a bit bitter.

“You're welcome. At least this time I can try to do something about it...” he answered, and Tony didn't ask, because he wasn't sure that he wanted to hear the story behind that tone.

* * *

Sitting on the floor, the low table braced upright on his shoulder, Tony struggled not to feel guilty.

He had borrowed a pencil from James, and now he was sketching schematics on the underside of the table. Robert's flyer was there too, glued to the wood by the remains of a meal that he had barely touched (James still needed to work on his cooking, because nothing edible should be so similar in consistence to a UHU stick). The engineer was trying – and failing – to ignore the stupid pamphlet.

_Do you feel afraid of your partner most of the time?_

He didn't. Not really. He just knew that he had to be careful.

_Do you avoid certain topics out of fear of angering your partner?_

That one was true, except that it wasn't about anger; he just didn't want to trigger James and make him fall back to his soldier's mindset. It wasn't as if James could control his episodes...

_Do you believe that you deserve to be hurt or mistreated?_

Well, no, he didn't, but then he _wasn't_ hurt or mistreated by James, so everything was fine there...

_Do you wonder if you're the one who is crazy?_

Tony had no illusion concerning his mental health. He still had trouble putting his head under the water in the shower, for god's sake... And James was even worse off. This flyer clearly wasn't written with heavily traumatized people like them in mind.

_Do you feel emotionally numb or helpless?_

He couldn't dismiss this one, though, but he was pretty sure that it had nothing to do with James. He could blame it on HYDRA and the Ten Rings.

The questions kept going on and on. It wasn't relevant, anyway, and he could only answer yes to maybe half of them, so why couldn't he just throw the thing out? Why did he feel the need to make it about him? James wasn't abusing him, James just needed his _help_. Not baseless accusation that would probably only worsen his protective urges.

Protective urges. What a nice way of talking about his paranoia.

Maybe that was the reason why Tony kept his ideas hidden under the table. He could already imagine the conversation that would ensue if James heard about them. _Why do you need that?_ and _I can protect you_ and _You can't build this, HYDRA will find us_ and _Don't you trust me?,_ with a side of _Why did you hide this from me?_

James didn't understand. Tony needed something to do, a project to keep his mind busy; even when he was a kid, he'd never gone for so long without working. Even HYDRA and the Ten Rings hadn't taken that from him (apart from that dreadful time in the first HYDRA base, but he was trying to forget that). He needed to use his brain, otherwise he couldn't control his thoughts, and right now they weren't going towards very nice places.

Of course, the armor schematics weren't his best work, if only because he was drawing on wood with a pencil that had been badly sharpened with a knife, but he loved them: the new armor was very different from the one he had escaped from the Ten Rings in, because he was assuming that he would have access to his lab and JARVIS to build it. While he had added a display inside the helmet and some weapons in the shoulders, the most important change was its less bulky shape and the flight system.

The repulsors.

He had been toying with the idea for a while, and had implemented a very basic version of them in the Jericho missile, but now that he could use the miniaturized arc reactor in his chest as an energy source, the design was beautiful. He couldn't wait to build them: they would allow him to control his trajectory, and were a far more efficient and less dangerous alternative to the flame throwers they had built in the first armor.

He was so engrossed in his work that he missed the telltale sounds of steps behind the door. He jumped when the lock turned, and the table fell upside-down.

“Tony? What's happening?” James asked worriedly.

“Nothing!” he said. “I just... Um...”

But it was already too late: James had seen the underside of the table.

“What is this?” he asked softly. “Tony? Why are there weapons drawn here? And... What is an abusive relationship?”


	9. When was I last home

“It's not what you think!” Tony blurted. And then promptly winced, because if James hadn't been suspicious before, he would certainly be now. Had this sentence _ever_ had a positive effect on anyone?

“I'm not... Actually, I have no idea what this is about. What were you doing?” James answered, bewildered. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine! Just peachy. Completely fine, everything is great, thanks for asking. I was just, hum, cleaning the underside of the table,” Tony babbled, “you wouldn't believe what kind of shit the previous tenant left here! Let's talk about something else. What are you doing here?”

“I'm... coming back because it's the end of the day... Like yesterday, and every other day since we arrived there,” James said, a suspicious frown slowly appearing on his face. “What is written there? It looks like your handwriting... 'Repulsor Powered Flying System'. What does that mean?”

“Well, since I didn't write it...” Tony started, before changing his mind when confronted with James' flat stare. “It's stupid, okay. Just some ideas that I had that kept bothering me, so I decided to write them down. It's a device that I had the idea for a while back, and that I perfected recently. But it's only theoretical, it's not like I could build this here...”

But instead of appeasing James like he had hoped, Tony's explanation only seemed to push James from suspicious to downright angry.

“Are you out of your mind?!” James shouted incredulously. “You know that we could need to leave at any point! We can't afford to leave this kind of evidence behind us! Hell, if someone managed to get inside while I'm away and saw what you were doing, what do you think would happen? You know how valuable these kind of things are, on the black market?”

“You think I don't know how much my ideas are worth?” Tony shot back, offended. “I might not be an expert in hiding in the seediest part of the fucking seediest city on this goddamn planet, but I've been making money off my designs since I was ten, so yes, I know! But what else am I supposed to do? I've been sitting on my ass since our escape. Do you really think that this is what I wanted, after fighting so hard to get away from the Ten Rings and then HYDRA?! I've been going from prison to prison for months! Even the doctor knew something was wrong, and he doesn't know either of us! He even brought me a flyer about conjugal violence!”

“Don't compare me to HYDRA!” James yelled, snatching Tony left-handedly by the front of his shirt. “Would you rather be in a cell, building weapons for them, instead of “sitting on your ass” here? I've been doing nothing but try to ensure our security since the escape, and you give me shit for that? Is it so hard to wait for a few months? You know we'll have more freedom once they aren't looking so hard for us! For now, there is a huge bounty on our heads, so no, I don't want you to go out, anyone could recognize you! And you think that they aren't keeping an eye on new buyers for mechanical parts? Just because we managed to pull one over them once does not mean that they are stupid! Or did you forget what happened last time they caught you going against them? I've been having nightmares about how they forced me to torture you... and if they get us now, do you know what will happen? They will wipe me, and then they will make me put a bullet through your head! You think that what I already did is bad, you just wait for them to get me back...”

By the end of it, he was red-faced and panting, and Tony was terrified. He had never seen James so angry: even when he reverted back to what Tony had dubbed his “soldier” mindset, he didn't get angry, he just seemed to lose the ability to feel emotions. But now, he looked like he was seriously considering throwing him out of a window. In their windowless room.

Tony knew that James had been hurt far more than him by HYDRA, but when he thought about his friend's trauma, he mostly imagined James dwelling on the years spent without any control over his destiny, the death that he had been forced to cause, like his parents'... The engineer hadn't thought that the short time he had witnessed James under Hydra's control had been more than a drop in an ocean of terrible experiences. And apparently, he had been wrong. Maybe it was because James remembered it better than the rest, maybe because Tony was there to remind him of those last few weeks. In any case, Tony hadn't known that James had been so affected by being made to hurt him.

How strange, he thought bitterly, that he hadn't considered James' point of view on this, forgetting it in favor of his own reaction... It was almost as if he was a self-centered asshole. Unlikely, uh?

Of course, when he was terrified like this, what did his brain do? Did it use diplomacy to try to defuse the situation? No, of course not, that would be too simple.

“Well how could I know about that if you didn't tell me about it?!” he growled back. “You just told me to stay put! For all I knew, you could have intended to keep me here forever! You make it sound as if hiding in this shithole was the only solution, when I have a mansion with the best security private funds can buy and the smartest AI in the world to protect us! But no, you need to do everything your way, you can't possibly listen to me, because what would the stupid billionaire genius know about security, uh? And nobody is threatening to break his fingers, so why would he complain if he _ha_ _s_ _n't seen the sun since Afghanistan?_ ”

James stilled for a second, and then his face lost his frown, and he very visibly reigned himself in. He wasn't sporting the completely blank look that had become his tell for his soldier mindset, but the deliberately calm expression was almost more disquieting. Suddenly, and Tony hadn't even realized that they had moved, the engineer felt his back hit the wall, and James' metal hand began pressing at his windpipe.

“You think that your house is safe?” he asked lowly. “Remind me, were you alone when you were kidnapped by the Ten Rings? Oh no, that's right, you were right in the middle of a _goddamn army convoy_!” He breathed in, and when he started talking again his voice was back at a normal volume. “And you were snatched by a group of second-rate terrorists who just happened to know where you would be. But sure, your electrified fence will keep HYDRA out. Maybe add a guard dog or two, though, in case a cyborg assassin manage to get through, it should be enough...”

If he had been able to answer, maybe Tony would have tried to defuse the situation. Well, he would probably have kept making things worse, goading James into a full blown screaming match, but it wasn't completely impossible that maturity would have made a late and sudden appearance in his life... Unfortunately, he had no way to know, because the pressure that James' hand was applying on his trachea had grown steadily until air couldn't come through. His vision was starting to swim, and he was trying to fight James' grip, but his muscles, weakened by inactivity and not enough eating, were no match for the servos of a metal arm.

His last thought was that James was going to hate himself for killing him, and his feelings on the subject were a complicated mix of regrets and petty satisfaction.

* * *

“Wake up wake up wake up, please don't be dead, oh god, what have I done?”

Tony woke up with a pounding head and an aching throat, and his first thought was that it was becoming a much too common occurrence in his life. At least he could hear James' voice, even though his brain was still way too fuzzy for him to understand what the other said. He tried opening his eyes, but couldn't focus his vision for a frightening moment.

“What happened this time?” he asked – or tried to: he started hating himself after the first word and ended his sentence in a garbled moan of pain. Had he... swallowed a cinderblock? It felt like there was a metal bar pushing across his throat...

“Don't try to talk right now,” James answered, appearing above his face, “your throat is busted.”

Of course, Tony couldn't answer vocally, but he hoped that his facial expression conveyed the unimpressed “duh” he couldn't voice.

“I'm sorry,” James added, “you were right.”

Okay, that was annoying. He couldn't just say something like that and just _stop_ there when Tony couldn't ask for precisions. He squinted his most inquisitive grimace.

James probably noticed because he said, “about going home. You need to go back to the States, you're not safe with me.”

Well, _that_ was a turn-around... Though he still felt light-headed, Tony tried to remember what had just transpired that could explain such a huge change of mind.

Ah, yes, their little bout of not-so-erotic asphyxiation...

Okay, if it had convinced James that they should head back home, maybe it wasn't too bad. Honestly, among everything Tony had lived through during the past few months, it barely warranted a mention. But now, apparently, the issue was going to be convincing James to come with him, since he seemed to think that Tony would be better off without him.

Which was not necessarily wrong, but Tony did have some notion of basic decency and knew that leaving James to fend for himself would be bad form. And after everything they had been through together, it didn't seem right to Tony, even if James was still kinda, sorta, a tiny bit dangerous to people close to him.

Okay, very dangerous. But in Malibu, Tony wouldn't be quite as vulnerable as he was now. With JARVIS, the bots, and everything in his workshop, he could stop James before he became a danger to anyone, including himself.

“You're coming with me, right?” he croaked, ignoring the pain that speaking brought to him.

“Are you crazy?” James exclaimed. “I just almost killed you! Again!”

“Well, it happens with all of my friends,” Tony shrugged. “Just ask Pepper. Or don't, she would actually tell you about everything. I want you with me: you're my friend and I'm not leaving you to stew in your own guilt.”

“Well you should,” James groused. “I don't get how you can be that calm about it. Do you know the number of times I hurt you – _badly –_ recently? I'm surprised the doctor hasn't tried to break you out of here by now.”

Yep, let's never tell him how close to that they had come, Tony decided. No need to bring the poor doctor into this discussion: it was already complicated and emotionally charged enough as it was.

“I'm not saying that I don't want you to stop,” Tony sighed, because yeah, he could do without the bruises and the concussions, “but it will be different in my house. I know that you're not convinced by my security, but I've got an omnipresent AI able to tell when someone is about to hurt me, and it can take some pretty serious measures to prevent it.”

James seemed dubious, but at least the edge of panic that had been visible in his expression since Tony had woken up had disappeared.

“I don't know what an AI is. Is it some sort of defense system?”

“It's short for 'Artificial Intelligence',” Tony explained. He had to consciously restrain himself from starting a two hours lecture about the origin of JARVIS and what exactly he was capable of, if only because James would probably not be able to understand a fourth of it. “You know what a computer is?”

“Hum, yes, I think that I was trained to use them.”

“Then an AI is a computer that can think like a human. You can think of it like a computer simulating a human mind.”

James flinched. “Ah, yes, I knew one, I think.”

“Well, it was probably not as good as JARVIS, since JARVIS is the best in the world.” Then he noticed how pale James looked. Whatever he was thinking about, it was probably not quite as benevolent as JARVIS. “I programmed him myself, you know,” Tony added, trying to reassure his friend. “He is like a robot butler, but without a body. His main goal is to ensure my well-being, so he's like a very patient parent sometimes... You don't need to fear him. Unless you try to kill me, and even so, I'm pretty sure that he would be able to tell the difference between hurting me on purpose and you losing control...”

“You... programmed him?” James tilted his head, his fear apparently forgotten. “So he's not a person who was put inside a computer?”

“Ugh, no,” Tony frowned, “how would that even work? Brains and computers are fundamentally different, JARVIS only sounds human because I asked him to. You can't just upload someone's mind from a heap of neurons into a bunch of circuits, those two things have nothing to do with each other...”

“Well, HYDRA has done it at least once, and it was a pretty long time ago,” James said quietly. “Not that the guy was very human before the procedure, but it worked: he was conscious and he sounded a lot like his flesh-and-blood self...”

“JARVIS is nothing like that,” Tony promised. “He has got a much better moral compass than most humans, actually, or at least than most humans that I know. I used advices from the best people I know to program him.”

“So it's just a machine, and it's made to follow strict ethical rules?” James asked, wariness replaced by curiosity.

“Precisely,” Tony answered enthusiastically. He didn't want to see his friend (who was maybe a little more than his friend, actually) afraid of his creation – and he only used the word creation because he had found out that hearing him refer to a computer as his son tended to creep people out. “He could probably even destroy the guy you were talking about, you know: he's never met a program that could resist him. If you can find about where the physical support of the code is stocked, he could wipe it thoroughly.”

“Really? That would be great, actually... Because it's not the only thing that I'd like to see wiped from any computer owned by HYDRA.” He stopped for a few moments, squinting. “I hadn't realized how much I know about them, but it means that I know precisely where to strike to hurt them the most...”

“And with my resources, it will be even better. What?” Tony added, when he saw the surprised look James was casting him. “You think that I don't want every single one of them dead? Besides, they probably have a political division, if they are so well organized, and you're going to want someone with well-placed relations to expose them. Come home with me: we'll destroy them together.”

James seemed to hesitate for a few seconds, but he then extended his hand. “Deal.”

* * *

“Civilian! American civilian! Don't shoot!” Tony yelled at the men who were running towards him. He had dropped to his knees as soon as he had been spotted, and had raised his hands above his head, where they were easily visible for the incoming soldiers.

He knew the moment they recognized him: they lowered their weapons and slowed their pace to a walk. He had shaved just before his and James’ departure from Madripoor, shaping his unruly beard into his usual goatee, estimating that if he was going to walk into an American military base, he should do his best to help everyone to identify him.

“Mr Stark?!” one of them - a sergeant - exclaimed. “What are you- Do you need medical assistance?”

Points for professionalism, he thought ruefully, the man hadn't let his curiosity stop him from checking on Tony’s health.

“It's not urgent,” he answered truthfully, because no one on this base could do anything about the arc reactor. “Can we go inside? I'm really thirsty…”

“Of course,” the soldier answered. “Anderson! Go back and tell Major Nathans to warn Colonel Rhodes that we got Stark! Wilson, Riley, you're with me. Let's get him to a doctor. Stevens, Amir, complete the perimeter check.”

One of the soldiers helped Tony up, and let him lean on his shoulder for the walk back to the army jeep waiting a few yards from them. Despite his exhaustion, which was overpowering since he had knelt on the sand, he couldn't stop smiling. He was going to see Rhodey. After months of captivity, he was finally going home.

  


Of course, before home, Tony was sent to a military hospital in Germany. The doctor of the base had taken a look at his chest and declared that he wasn't qualified to treat him, so he had checked that Tony was flight-ready and they had put him in a jet as fast as they could get their flight path cleared.

Now he was lying on a cot, in the plane, an IV drip stuck in his elbow - for the mild dehydration and long-term malnutrition - and a soldier watching his bedside. Though they had all seemed a little starstruck at the beginning, that one was very good at pretending that everything was normal. If anything, he seemed worried about Tony’s mental health, and Tony could hardly resent him for that: he was worried about it himself.

“Sooooo… Wilson, right? You're a para-rescue?” he drawled when the silence became straight up awkward.

“Yes, Mr Stark, Airman Wilson,” the soldier answered - a little bit too fast for the air of cool detachment that he was trying to project. Tony tried not to think about selfies in the back of a Humvee.

“How long have you been there?” Tony asked, trying to find a good topic for conversation.

“It's my second tour, I've been in Afghanistan for three years. I'm testing the Falcon wings, ” he added. “You worked on them personally, right?”

“You're using the wings?” Tony beamed. “That's great! Yes, I designed the propulsion system, and I was in the team that created the alloy used to protect it. What do you think about it? The test phase must be almost over, by now?”

“It's great, I've never flown anything so intuitive!” Wilson grinned. “And the possibilities for rescuing people are extraordinary… What did you use to make the harness so light?”

The rest of the flight passed in a blur of technical discussion. Wilson was smart – not quite as smart as Tony, but he had the perspective of someone who had actually flown the wings in the Afghan sky; he had suggestions about how Tony could make them easier to put on and off, about how he could protect the pilot better against bad weather, how he should distribute the weight of the apparel better…

They kept talking until the plane landed; Tony signed a few autograph for Wilson and his teammates before he was ushered inside the hospital – on a gurney, despite his protests that he was perfectly able to walk on his own, thank you very much.

Then, when they reached the hall, Tony saw Rhodey.

No force on earth could have stopped him from standing up then; he opened his arm just in time to receive the best hug that he'd ever had.

Some time later, when his feet were back on the floor, and after Rhodey had lead them to an empty hospital room, he asked, “missed me, Rhodey-bear?”

“You have no idea how much,” Rhodey answered, and Tony winced at the naked relief audible in his words. “Liaising with Stark Industries is not the same when you're not here to make everything difficult...”

“I'm a delight and you know it,” Tony declared, hiding his (various, powerful) emotions behind his usual arrogance. He knew that his friend wasn't fooled and saw through him every time, but that didn't mean that he wanted to admit how happy he was to see him again. God, in what state would he find Pepper? Happy? Obie?

“So, when is my plane leaving for the States?” he asked cockily as soon as he no longer felt that his voice would give him away.

“I don't know,” Rhodey answered. “When is your medical exam scheduled? And your debriefing? You need to tell me what happened, and how you got to that base... Who had you? What did they want? How did you get away from them? There wasn't any ransom demand or I would have been warned...”

“Aw, you've been following the search for me? I'm touched,” Tony smirked, though he wasn't surprised. He would have done the exact same if his friend had been MIA.

“I've been _overseeing_ the search for you, asshat. I know exactly what happens when you're left to your own devices,” Rhodey retorted without bite.

“You wound me... I've been doing pretty well for myself, considering,” Tony argued, ignoring how warmed by the admission he felt. It was always nice, being reminded how much his friends valued him.

“Considering what? The giant night-light in your chest?” Rhodey bit back, his tone much lighter than Tony expected, considering the subject that he was breaching. “It's not a tattoo, is it? You promised me that you'd never get a tattoo without me vetting it first...”

Though he was thankful for the joke, Tony knew that Rhodey wouldn't believe him until he got the whole truth out of him. Ultimately, he could drag their banter for hours, but he didn't really have the energy for it. Maybe he could even avoid an official debriefing by telling him everything right now...

With James, they had decided – after lots of wrangling, because Tony would rather have told Rhodey (and Pepper, Happy and Obie) everything while James wanted to stay in the shadow forever – that Tony would start with the “official” version, the one in which he never left Afghanistan, and that he would give a few weeks for James to get used to his friends before Tony introduced them.

It was a good compromise, and Tony knew that if he pushed too much, James would probably disappear and never come back to him, so he had decided to stick to it. He was supposed to meet with James, who was traveling on his own by boat, in Malibu as soon as they were both there. Tony knew not to expect James before at least a few weeks had passed.

So he started talking.

He explained that he had been captured by the Ten Rings, and that he had been hurt badly enough that the “night-light” was keeping him alive. That he had been saved by Yinsen, another prisoner. That they wanted him to build them the Jericho. He glossed over the torture, not because he wanted to spare Rhodey, but because he wasn't sure that he could talk about it without a breakdown, and skipped to the part where him and Yinsen made plans to get out. Recalling Yinsen's death was difficult, but he _wanted_ to tell his friend about it, so he pushed himself. He conveniently didn't detail which kind of weapons had allowed him to get out of the camp – the armor was still at the back of his head, but he wasn't going to let anyone else get their hand on it – and made up something about stealing a truck and driving until the vehicle broke down, and then walking to the base.

If they decided to check, they _would_ find an out of fuel hummer a few miles from the base, because that was how he had traveled there, but from Kabul, of course. It would be much harder to find the blown-up remains of the Ten Rings camp, since Tony had conveniently left two whole months out of his narration, so he hoped that they wouldn't dig too far in that particular direction, but he expected them to mostly believe him: why would he lie?

When he stopped talking, he had to wait for a whole twenty seconds before Rhodey spoke. Even then, he just said, “you're completely crazy, man, you know that, right?”

Tony had to smile, because he did know. “Fuck you too,” he answered, “I just wanted to go home.”

Rhodey's gaze softened. “I know,” he smiled, “and as soon as a medical doctor – don't give me that look! A PhD in mechanical engineering doesn't count! As soon as a medical doctor has checked that this isn't going to kill you, we'll take the jet that Pepper sent for you, and then we're going home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to admit that I only know what Wikipedia could tell me about the US army, so if anyone spot any glaring inaccuracy, don't be surprised... (but tell me, I'll be happy to correct it!)


	10. Decisions and consequences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying to get back to a more regular kind of posting, so bear with me while I deal with life, but thank you so much for reading this and reacting, people. Your comments and kudos are an insane source of joy to me.
> 
> Happy reading!

“Your eyes are red. A few tears for your lost boss?” Tony asked when he saw Pepper's face.

“Tears of joy,” she retorted, “I hate job-hunting.”

He smiled at her, grateful to see his relief at being back mirrored in her eyes. God, he had missed her so much...

But he didn't have time for tearful reunions, and Pepper wouldn't thank him if he made her ruin her make-up by crying. His short time in army infrastructures, surrounded by young soldiers, had reminded him of what had started the whole mess. Namely, the fact that his weapons had ended up in some _very_ bad hands.

He couldn't let this stand. He had been blind for a very long time, but the thought that his greatest legacy would be of blood and treason... He needed a way to put a stop to it.

And there was an easy one. Well, materially easy: he could imagine that he was going to have to fight tooth and nail to impose it upon the board. Obie was going to _hate it_.

But hopefully, when confronted to the facts that their weapons were  _not_ doing more good than harm, he  (and everyone else) would relent.

That's how he found himself sitting down in front of a very bewildered audience. He knew that he probably looked half-crazy, with his cheeseburger in one hand, his crutches in the other, and his unkempt hair and  black rings under his eyes, but this couldn't wait.

  


_____________________

  


The conference was a disaster. Tony could see it in the clench of Obadiah's jaw, when he lead him away from the journalists. It was pretty obvious that no matter what kind of arguments Tony had, Obie wouldn't listen to him right now, so he didn't stick around and try to explain himself; he just ducked under his godfather's arm and hopped into the car that was waiting for him, with Happy behind the wheel.

“You don't loose time, boss, right?” Happy asked as soon as he started driving. “Mr Stane looked ready to rip you a new one...”

“He'll wait,” Tony sighed, “I've got better things to do than listen to his complaining. This is important. He'll understand tomorrow, when he'll have had some time to cool down a bit.”

“If you say so, boss...” Happy didn't seem overly convinced, but he didn't understand the reasons behind Tony's actions. And he didn't know Obie as well as Tony did: the old man _did_ kinda look like a huge heartless bastard when you didn't knew him, while in reality he was... only most of a heartless bastard.

But like all good businessmen, he would understand that closing down the weapons development branch of Stark Industries was the only way to avoid a very nasty backlash further down the road.

It was a risk, sure. But Tony had an ace up his sleeve.

Or in his chest, as it happened.

The arc reactor was revolutionary and would be at the heart of SI  rebirth . Well, that and a new prosthetic line that he had some ideas about, but the prosthetics would probably take a few years before becoming economically  viable , what with needing a whole new  bunch of experts to be  hired and set to work ... Details, details.

And while he would be able to orient their research a little bit with what he had seen in James’ arm, he needed to be very careful that nobody could guess were this “inspiration” was coming from.

Still, with the ameliorations he had made to the reactor, which included not only miniaturization, but also a great reduction of the heat output – his body wouldn't have appreciated the former 200000 watts – it would finally be usable in a normal setting. A full sized one could probably power half of New York for ten years, be located inside the city with basically no risk of dangerous failure, all the while producing a ridiculously small amount of CO2 (most of it during the construction).

Ecologists from everywhere were going to love him so much. Maybe it would even appease the peace activists who hated him...

Anyway, he wasn't too worried about the board. Obie had always been on his side, and with the two of them, it wouldn't be hard to sway everyone. The company would suffer a lot on the short run, that was unavoidable, but Tony was confident that they could absorb the worse of it without laying anyone off, which was the most important: Tony didn't want his own mistakes to cost their jobs to people whose only sin had been trusting the Stark name.

Then his phone started ringing, and he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to warn someone else about his decision.

And to Rhodey, it probably looked a lot like Tony was destroying his job.

He almost took the call, but decided that like Obie, Rhodey wouldn't listen to a word from him, while after a few hours to cool down he would realize that Stark Industry was still going to be a huge contractor for the army: they would keep selling body armor, vehicles equipped for protecting the passengers, and various non-offensive equipment...

Tony had a brief thought for Wilson and his division. He hoped that he would meet them again some time, and that they wouldn't hold his decision against him.

And as for Rhodey, his escape from the cave and his latest reflexions in Madripoor had given him a few ideas for a gift that would bring him around.

But right now, he didn't want to sooth people who probably thought that he was off his rocker. He just wanted to talk to JARVIS, and loose himself in his lab for a few hours. He had several projects that he couldn't wait to start working on with a real computer to help him.

  


_____________________

  


“JARVIS, say hi to daddy!” he yelled as he crossed the main door of his house.

“Welcome, sir,” the cultured, British-sounding voice of his AI answered, “and may I say how nice it is to see you again?”

“Aw,” Tony grinned, “you missed me?”

“Of course,” the AI shot back, “Dummy is not nearly as inventive as you are for finding exciting ways to raise my metaphorical blood pressure.”

“I'll need to update his coding, then,” Tony smiled, “we wouldn't want you to get iddle. Did you try to take over the world while I was away?”

“Well, like I said, I was bored,” JARVIS said, “but I put everything back into place when I heard that you were back. I wouldn't want my side hobbies to distract me from serving you.”

“Did I ever tell you how much I love you?” Tony answered affectionately. He knew that his AI wasn't used to declarations of affection – not such direct ones, anyway – and JARVIS' ensuing pause was very telling, but he wasn't ashamed: after going through several lengthy deadly situation in a few months, the relief at finding his creations where he had left them was outmatchinghis usual dislike of displays of emotions by a few orders of magnitude.

“Not in so many words, sir,” JARVIS eventually answered, “but rest assured that neither me nor the bots ever doubted the nature of your feelings about us.”

And the fondness was so obvious in this synthetic voice that Tony would have cried if he wasn’t too busy smiling stupidly at his own ceiling (the cameras were there, okay, and sometimes even he needed to feel like he was looking at someone’s eyes…).

“Okay, let’s stop having _feelings_ before I break into hives,” he said briskly, “we’ve got work to do. J, create two new project folders, code names… Mark II, and Antares.”

  


_____________________

  


“Tony, Tony, what on earth happened to this genius head of yours?” Obadiah said, entering Tony’s workshop.

The inventor sighed. “And good evening to you too, Obie,” he drawled. “What do you want?”

“Can’t I visit my favorite godson?” Obie tried.

Tony didn’t even dignify that with an answer; he just stared at the businessman and waited.

Obie sighed. “You know why I’m here. What were you thinking about?! You could have at least warned me, we would have talked it through! But no, you had to do it your way, in a press conference instead of calling a board meeting! Do you know how long it takes to repair this kind of damage? You-”

“It couldn’t wait!” Tony burst out, interrupting what would probably have been an epic rant. “It was urgent. Do you know where our weapons go, Obie? Do you know _who_ they go to? It’s my name on them, and they’re used by...” He had to swallow around the lump in his throat. This wasn’t working: to get Obie on his side, he needed to talk like a businessman.

“We can do this,” he added more calmly. “I’m not saying that we should cut all ties with the army, just that I want to stop selling bombs. We have a lot of contracts for strictly defensive products: between the body armor, the armored vehicles… And we can branch out! The green energy sector will be booming soon, and we could be on the forefront of that wave.”

“Green energy?” Obie scoffed. “Are you talking about the arc reactor? You know it was a proof of concept and a PR move, right?”

But even as he was trying to sound dismissive, the older man’s eyes couldn’t help sliding down to Tony’s chest. The engineer wasn’t fooled: he knew his godfather and could recognize the greed shining through his forced disinterest.

“Alright, who told you?” he asked after a pause. “Rhodey or Pepper?”

“Come on, Tony, show me,” Obie demanded. “Hom small is it?”

“It was Rhodey, wasn’t it?” Tony said, fending off the businessman’s attempts to get his hands on his collar. “Stop that! I don’t like people touching it.”

The truth was that since he’d been back on American soil, he didn’t like the idea of people touching him at all. He knew that it was stupid: it hadn’t been an issue before with Yinsen, James, Rhodey, or even Robert or Wilson. For that matter, though he hadn’t felt any pressing need to hug any of his captors – James didn’t count, okay – the thought of them putting their hands on him hadn’t been enough to make him break into a cold sweat like he had experienced recently.

At least his protests stopped Obie’s pawing.

Sighing, he opened the first few buttons of his shirt, revealing the top of the casing embedded in his sternum. Unlike his usual band shirts, the dress shirt had the benefit of being thick enough to hide the light coming out of the device: Tony had yet to decide how open about this specific weakness of his he wanted to be.

As soon as he could see it clearly, Obie’s expression turned fascinated.

“You think that we could mass-produce them?” he asked, still staring at the reactor.

“If I could make one in a cave from a box of scraps and a clay mold, we should manage,” Tony said dryly. “But it’s not completely ready yet. I need to refine the design, now that I have JARVIS to run the numbers for me, and test it to check its capacity and its durability. And make sure that it’s not going to explode.”

Obie took a step back. “Is that a risk?” he asked nervously.

Tony shrugged. “I figure that since it’s still working it’s okay for now, but I’m not using it for much. It don’t want houses to blow up because someone started the washing-machine and the dishwasher while the A/C and the computer were running. But unless I find some very deep flaw, the design should be ready in a few months.” And if it fails now, the whole house is going down, so a few steps back won’t save you, Tony thought a little bit uncharitably. But he was going to swap this unit with a newer, better one in a few hours, so they were probably in the clear.

Obie didn’t look completely convinced, but he stopped backing away. “What kind of output are we expecting?” he asked.

“For one this size? I think it could power a small house or a flat,” Tony answered. “But if we’re powering buildings, we need to see bigger: there is no reason to keep them so small. Remember Howard’s idea? The tower?”

“It was a vanity project and you know it,” Obadiah retorted.

“But it could become a statement,” Tony argued. “The reactor in our HQ will soon be completely outdated. With one made like mine but the size of the old one, we could build the first self-sustaining skyscraper in the world!”

Obie frowned. “You remember why the project was scraped, right?” he asked. “It wasn’t just because of the cost...”

“That’s the point,” Tony smiled. “The new reactor would be more powerful by at least two orders of magnitude, overloading it will be impossible – that’s the only safety concern with the old one – and I’m not a hundred percent sure about how long it would last, but it would be at least a decade, which is long enough to have a positive return on investment.”

“You seem very sure about this. Weren’t you saying that it wasn’t ready at all yet?” Obie asked, doubtful.

“I need to do a lot of optimization and safety tests, but it’s not going to be hard, just long,” Tony shrugged.

“If that’s the case, why don’t you put a few scientists from our R&D on it? Some of them are brilliant, I’m sure that if you give them your blueprints they’ll figure it out,” Obie suggested.

Tony frowned. It wasn’t a bad idea, and he had meant to do exactly that, but the way his godfather has talked had been… odd. Casual, but almost too much.

He had no idea what that meant, and maybe he was just being paranoid (which could be excused, given that he had recently been kidnapped _twice_ ), but he resolved to do a little bit of digging before handing out his project to anyone else.

“You’re right, but I still want to work on it a bit more before that,” he smiled. “It’s kind of a personal project...”

Obie made a face. “Then you should hurry, because the board is going to want some proof that you’re not just having a meltdown.”

“Well, as long as we have a controlling interest on the company, it’s not an issue, right?”

Obie sighed. “You know they can still demand answers. But I trust you to handle this. At least lay low for a while, okay? No expansive parties until it blows over, and if you need a girl, choose one who won’t go babbling to the tabloids.”

“You got it,” Tony smiled. Making those promises wasn’t exactly a hardship, since he really didn’t want to put himself in situations where people would try to touch him.

And the part about girls… Well, if the reactor and his current aversion for human contact hadn’t already been enough of a deterrent for most of his usual conquests, he was pretty sure that James wouldn’t appreciate it much. Tony didn’t want to get a woman horribly murdered by his jealous maybe-boyfriend.

Or get _himself_ horribly murdered, for that matter. It wasn’t as if James had never hurt him.

Obie reached out to hug Tony as he was leaving the workshop, but Tony ducked away again, less subtly than he would have preferred, judging by the weird, considering look his godfather threw his way.

  


_____________________

  


“J, is Pepper still around?” Tony asked his AI.

“She is upstairs, sir,” the synthetic voice answered. “Do you want me to direct a call to her tablet?”

“Yes, do that,” Tony said. He waited for the short beep indicating that he was on the line, and blurted, “Pepper, how big are your hands?”

“What?” she answered over the grating voice of a TV host. Why was she watching this garbage?

Okay, she was probably doing the responsible thing and keeping an eye on public opinion.

Whatever.

“How big are your hands?” he repeated, a little bit more impatiently.

“I don’t understand-”, she started.

“Get down here. I need you,” he interrupted. He knew that he was being rude, but he didn’t care much: it was Pepper, she was used to him.

Two minutes later, he heard her enter her code on the workshop door.

“Let see them. Show me your hands,” he demanded. She raised them, and he eyed her appreciatively. “Wow, they are small, very petite, indeed.”

He knew that he was babbling, and given his PA unamused expression, she did too. Well, time to cut to the chase…

“I just need your help for a second,” he admitted, looking at the new arc reactor in his hands.

“Oh my god, is that the thing that’s _keeping you alive_?” she asked, eyes fixed on his chest.

Shit, was it the first time she could see it directly? Now that he was thinking about it, he realized that he hadn’t been bare-chested in front of her since his return from Afghanistan. Or in front of anyone, actually… Obie had been the only one to get a clear look at it in America.

Woops. Time for a diversion.

“It was, but now it’s an antique,” he said glibly, and gestured towards the device in his hand. “This is what will be keeping me alive for the foreseeable future. I’m swapping it up for an upgraded unit, and I just ran into a little... speed bump.” God, what was he saying, Pepper was just looking more and more worried.

“Speed bump?” she repeated, incredulous. “What does that mean?”

“It’s nothing, just a little snag,” he reassured her while twisting the old reactor out of its housing. “There’s an exposed wire under this device and it’s contacting the socket wall and causing a little bit of a short. It’s fine.”

To Pepper’s obvious horror, he yanked on the thing until it disconnected completely for the hole in his chest and handed it to her.

“What do you want me to do?!” she asked.

“Put that on the table over there,” he said distractedly, ignoring her muttered swearing, “it’s irrelevant. I just want you to reach in, and you’re just gonna gently lift the wire out.”

“Is it safe?” She pulled a face.

“Yeah, it should be fine,” he lied with a smile. She didn’t need to know how much could go wrong...

  


One cardiac arrest and two fits of giggles later, he watched Pepper leave with the obsolete reactor, and reflected that he had no idea what he had done to deserve her.

Which lead him to another thought. Which other friend had he been neglecting lately?…

Shit. Time to face the music.

Rhodey was _not_ going to be pleased.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for everyone who left comments and kudos, I love you all! You can find me on [tumblr](http://nonolemog.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Please tell me if you find anything wrong... Constructive criticism is welcome!
> 
> Warnings:
> 
>   * canon typical violence;
>   * physical and psychological torture, graphic threats (not very detailed);
>   * Stockholm syndrome and abuse not recognized as such (the relationship between Tony and Bucky at the beginning is _not_ healthy!);
>   * panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, depressive behavior, issues with food;
>   * discussion of murder and self-harm.
> 



End file.
